


Wrap Our Love In Gold And Fire, And Burn, Burn, Burn

by leonidaslion



Series: Suite!verse [20]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apocalypse, Dark, Dubious Consent, Evil Sam Winchester, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-05
Updated: 2011-11-10
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:31:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sam comes for him in a motel on the outskirts of Boston, Dean has trouble adjusting...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Chronologically, this takes place just after [I Would Burn the World](http://archiveofourown.org/works/180182).

Dean wakes to golden eyes peering down at him. The broad nose registers next, followed by a shaggy brown fringe of hair, and a familiar mole that puts it all in context. Everything’s upside down for some reason, though—everything’s the wrong way round, and the eyes are the wrong color, and for a moment Dean thinks he’s having a nightmare.

Then Sam’s mouth— _above_ his nose, fuck, what is this?—twists into something that looks like a snarl and Sam’s voice says, “There you are.”

It’s the relief in his voice that really gets to Dean—that heartbreaking little quiver that Dean’s heard way too often over the last eleven months. Man, Sam must have been really worried about him this time. Whatever happened to get Dean here, and to fuck with his vision like this, it must have been bad.

Relief means that the worst of Sam’s distress is over with, but Dean has actually met his brother before, so he knows that Sam is still angsting over something. He moves to offer comfort without thinking, then stills again as new information floods in and has to be processed. He’s on something hard and unyielding, and his head is bracketed by cradling warmth. An uneven surface supports the back of his skull and neck, levering his head up at an angle.

After a couple seconds of intense concentration, Dean understands that he’s lying on the floor with his head in Sam’s lap, with Sam’s hands cupping his face while Sam leans over him and looks down. All of which accounts for the inverted line-up of Sam’s features, but does nothing to settle the question of his eyes—those unfamiliar, terrifying eyes that burn an unearthly amber color.

Like someone hollowed out Sam’s irises and poured molten gold into the cavities.

Dean thinks he should know what’s going on here. He thinks he should be more than clear on the subject, actually, but something’s getting in the way. He suspects, truth be told, that he’s getting in his own way, and as he tries to pull his thoughts together, only to have his mind immediately twist and scatter the threads of comprehension to the four winds, he has his confirmation.

Somewhere beyond the disorientation and mild shock, his brain is doing an acrobatic, convoluted dance to keep from remembering…

[ _rain, rain hitting his face and soaking through the gag and_ ]

Dean sits up, maneuvering to one side to avoid knocking his forehead against Sam’s face. His breath is coming a little faster than he wants to admit as his eyes dart here and there around the room, noting the faded floral pattern of the wallpaper, and the fluorescent light overhead, and the dark brown rug pressing up against his palms—slightly stiff and scratchy, but clean. A single king-sized bed looms off to the left, and even from his angle on the floor, Dean can see that its covers ( _black, black and shiny_ ) are thrown back and its sheets rumpled from use. Dresser. Desk. Armchair. Two doors—one latched with chain and deadbolt, the other opening onto a darkened bathroom. An oversized curtained window taking up most of one wall, cheesy paintings on the others.

Motel room, then. Slightly more upscale than Dean is used to.

[ _wide eyes staring into his, no color to the irises, in the moonlight he can’t see if they’re brown or green or blue, but there’s no mistaking the terror there, no mistaking the dark figure standing over her_ ]

Dean lifts a hand to his head, shutting his eyes and trying to reconcile the need to know what the fuck is going on with the protective instinct keeping the crucial memories at bay.

“Hey,” Sam says from behind him. His hands land on Dean’s shoulders, gripping and massaging. “How are you doing?”

There’s something odd about the way Sam’s hands feel, and after a second or so Dean figures out what it is: no clothing getting in the way. He opens his eyes again, this time looking down at himself, and he’s not wearing a shirt. That in itself isn’t exactly weird. Not when he and Sam are alone here—when they don’t need to worry about Dad ( _gone, he’s dead_ ) or Bobby ( _Bobby? Is he in trouble? Why the fuck does Dean feel like he’s in trouble_ ) walking in on them.

What concerns Dean are the pants he’s wearing—loose and billowy and soft-looking and like nothing he’s ever seen before, let alone owned. When he brushes his fingertips against his thigh, the fabric feels like a cross between silk and cashmere. Decadent. Sensual.

That thought makes him look toward the bed again—toward the disarrayed fall of black sheets that might very well have been cut from the same fabric as his pants.

Someone got fucked in that bed. Or had one hell of a bad dream.

[ _‘Just a little taste, Azazel; I want to see what I’m missing out on.’_ ]

The voice insinuates itself into Dean’s thoughts like an echo—both there and yet not—and he shakes his head, not liking the cold ripples it sends through him. Not liking the way it makes him think of chains on his wrists, and panic gnawing at his chest, and the stench of urine ( _his own_ ) and shit ( _also his own_ ). The sound of the television in the background. Black skies filled with smoke on the flat, pitiless screen. And in the room with him, in the room there’s another danger—a ring of white, pupil-less eyes…

Dean cuts his eyes away from the bed ( _not the same one, this one is too big; this room is too nice to belong to the place in his pleasegodletitbeadream_ ) His breath comes too quickly as he stares ahead at the bland, innocuous motel room wall, and he realizes that, despite his continuing inability to piece together the clues, he’s riding the edge of panic. He’s a heartbeat away from terror, actually, shoved there by his awareness of how close the memories are coming: of how thin the barrier between rational thought and base instinct has grown.

Below the surface clarity of Dean’s mind, his body is clamoring at him to move, to go, to get the fuck out of here now.

Dean’s hand moves again against the fabric covering his thigh. His eyes slip back to the bed in a rolling, nervous motion that makes him think of terror-driven horses.

Fuck, he wants a weapon. He hasn’t seen their duffle, though, and that makes even less sense than everything else. Dean always brings that bag in first thing when he checks into a room. And even if he was apparently out of commission when they checked in here, he could have sworn he’d trained Sam into taking the same cautious approach.

So where the hell is the bag?

“Come on, man,” Sam urges from behind him ( _and why doesn’t having Sam in his blind spot make Dean feel at all safe?_ ). “Say something. Dean.”

[ _“Dean,” Sam breathes, and the word is a prayer and a caress and a summons all at once. He’s standing in the doorway, wearing a ratty pair of jeans and a button-down shirt that Dean thinks might be blue. He can’t tell for sure, though, because the shirt is molded to his brother’s body, slicked black with the same blood that coats Sam’s hands and peppers his face. His eyes are yellow: brighter than the demon’s and burning with a faint, gold cast. In the sky behind his brother’s shoulders, Dean can see smoke rising, black and thick._ ]

Dean blinks and he’s back in this now. In this room.

“Dean,” Sam says again. His voice is still soft and unthreatening, but that was it, there’s no shutting out the memories that are pouring into him after that last jolt. Dean stares sightlessly down at himself as a series of nightmarish moments strobe through his brain in stark, too clear flashes of illumination.

Sam drugging him, the cemetery, the demon, that motherfucking hotel room and the weeks he spent chained to the bed, that little girl the demon killed—Christ, the girl Sam killed—Sam coming for him, Sam’s power crawling over him, the demon persuading Sam to wait, promising Dean wouldn’t be lonely, that he wouldn’t know, and then the demon reaching for him, followed by…

Dean woke up here, in this room, with his head in Sam’s lap and Sam’s hands gripping his head.

Dean realizes Sam’s hands are still on him—Sam is still massaging his shoulders—and he shoves up and away with a gut-wrenching jolt of betrayal and horror. His skin is crawling as he whirls around, scanning the room for a weapon, for something he can use to knock Sam out long enough to—to—

To what? Last time Dean saw him, Sam was exploding demons with the weight of his power. He was filling the streets with fire and death. He was tearing the world down around him and, thanks to the unrelenting coverage of NBC cable news, Dean got to watch it happen.

“What the fuck did you do?” he breathes, finally dismissing the rest of the room ( _and the bed, the bed with its rumpled sheets, and how long was Sam here before he woke Dean up, what did he do_ ) and focusing on his brother.

From his casual, cross-legged position on the floor, Sam gazes up at Dean. His face is calm. If there’s any emotion in those alien, golden eyes, then Dean’s too upset to decipher it.

“What the _fuck_ did you do, Sam?” he repeats, more loudly.

“I saved you.”

“You—” Dean starts, and then bites back on the rest of his words with a sharp-edged bark of laughter. “I don’t even know what the fuck to say to that,” he admits, not sure whether he’s speaking more to himself or to Sam.

He can’t take his eyes off of his brother—even if he had it in him to look away, it isn’t safe—but he can and does start backing toward the door. He has to get out of here, put some distance between himself and Sam and the power riding Sam’s body right now. He has to find Bobby, figure out what to—

“Don’t.”

Dean hasn’t ever heard Sam’s voice sound like that before: low and threatening. Commanding. He’s startled by how much Sam sounds like Dad. Dean has stopped moving before he’s conscious of making a decision.

Oh God. Oh God, did Sam _make_ him do that? Did he?

Frantically, Dean turns his attention inward. There are no echoes ricocheting around in Dean’s head, like there were when Sam Obi Wanned him in the car. There’s no coppery tickle at the back of his throat either, although he tastes plenty of fear.

Which means that instinctive flutter of obedience was all Dean.

Horror drenches him—he can’t let himself respond to Sam like that. Not after what Sam did to the world.

What Sam did to him.

How the fuck could Sam ever have thought this would be okay?

Grappling to keep the complete and utter freak-out he wants to have at arm’s length, Dean forces his mind down more pragmatic paths.

No matter how satisfying yelling at Sam would be right now, they’ve moved way past shouting. From what Dean has seen and heard since that night in the graveyard, reasoning with Sam isn’t going to do shit. Dean doesn’t have any instant solutions up his sleeves, either—how can he, when he doesn’t even know what Sam is right now? He has his doubts as to whether there’s even any lore on this kind of thing.

After Sam spilled the beans on his unholy baptism, they spent almost a full week at Bobby’s researching the properties of demon blood and found diddly squat. Bobby burned through all of his old contacts and favors, Sam hacked every database that seemed even remotely useful, and Dean buried his nose so far into musty old tomes he was sure he’d still be sneezing when the hounds came to get him.

What Sam did in the graveyard—drinking the demon’s blood like a frat boy chugging his first beer of the night—might just be more of the same problem, in which case they’ve got bupkis. Or it could be some completely new monster, which would mean starting from square one all over again.

Either way, Dean needs more information. He needs time to regroup, to talk over the ritual in which he unwillingly participated with Bobby, to get some distance between himself and the sting of shocked betrayal.

Which means he needs to get out of here. With Sam’s unconscious and subdued body if possible, on his own if not.

One more look around the room is enough to convince Dean he’ll have a hard time knocking his brother out. The place is more or less bare; Dean’s best option at a weapon is the lamp on the nightstand, and Dean would have to get past Sam to get to it. He’s almost certain that Sam wouldn’t attack him, but he can’t really be sure what Sam would do anymore. Not when he so clearly and disastrously misjudged his brother’s desperation. Not when he’s been so thoroughly blindsided by how far Sam was willing to go to keep Dean here with him instead of playing whipping boy down below.

Which brings Dean right back to the door he was making for a moment ago. Dean doesn’t quite dare glance toward his destination, but he does angle his body in the door’s direction. The shift isn’t much—not more than an altered stance and a slight twist to his torso—but it’s enough for Sam’s eyes to narrow suspiciously.

Clearly, Dean’s going to have to distract his brother in order to get close enough to the door to make a run for it. Add to that his rising need to know where the yellow-eyed demon is, and Dean knows exactly what opening gambit to use.

Keeping his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, Dean asks in what he hopes is a casual tone, “Where’s Yellow Eyes?”

“Which one?” Sam replies.

It’s enough to stop Dean all over again, dragging his thoughts to a halt and drawing unpleasant conclusions in his head.

Black-eyed demons are bad enough— _Meg_ was bad enough, although if Sam is here now and Dean’s memories are to be trusted, Meg at least isn’t a problem any longer. But the yellow-eyed demon was a different breed altogether—stronger, crueler, more resourceful. What Sam is hinting at—that there’s more than one of those sons of bitches, that they’re out and about alongside their lesser kin—is… Well, “disaster” isn’t a big enough word to cover it. Hell, Dean isn’t sure “catastrophe” comes close.

“How many are there to choose from?” he asks, carefully keeping his tone neutral.

Sam smiles in a way that makes Dean’s stomach move unpleasantly. “How many stars are there in the sky?”

That’s so not the response Dean was hoping for. Dean tells himself that Sam’s exaggerating—that he’s bluffing. But Sam doesn’t look like he’s bluffing. He’s sitting on the floor in one of the most relaxed, confident postures Dean has ever seen from him. The expression on his face indicates that he doesn’t care whether Dean believes him or not.

Before the graveyard, Dean would have said that Sam wasn’t that good a liar. He has to second guess himself now, because apparently Sam is good enough at deception to have arranged that little soiree without Dean suspecting anything. He could be lying now. He could.

Dean just doesn’t think he is.

His skin crawls at the thought of that many powerful, evil bastards running around. How many of them are loose? How many are standing right outside the motel room door, waiting to help themselves to Sam’s leftovers. If anything is leftover once Sam is done with him.

Dean remembers that sensation again—those grasping, unseen hands. The sensation of Sam inside him. A threat lurking beneath the pawing caresses—something sharp and hungry. The certainty that Sam was going to rip him apart.

The need for a weapon ripples through Dean once more—stronger this time, more urgent—and even though he already knows he won’t find anything, he can’t help looking around the room yet again. Tacky paintings on the walls with no protective glass to break; armchair and small table too heavy and awkward to lift. Lamp on the other side of Sam. The rumpled, clearly used bed.

Dean doesn’t feel like he’s been fucked, though. If Sam had… If he’d done something while Dean was out, Dean would feel it, right? But he can’t get the thought out of his head, and he doesn’t like how helpless his imaginary self is in that vision, when Sam lets himself into the room and slides under the covers and puts his hands all over Dean’s unresisting body.

This is his brother, the guy he’s been sleeping with on and off again for over ten years, but the feelings of violation and unease that accompany the thought of being touched like that are viscerally strong.

Dean catches movement at the edge of his vision and his eyes snap back to Sam as he rises smoothly to his feet and holds out a hand.

“Come here,” Sam says. His voice is full of the same casual insistence that Dean has gotten used to hearing over the years. Sam expecting to get his way, just like he always does. Sam has never been good at accepting ‘no’s, and Dean suspects that he’ll be even less gracious about them now, so Dean doesn’t offer him one.

Instead, he slips sideways around the not-quite command to ask, “Why?”

Sam smiles the same blinding way he’s always been able to—more of a grin than a smile, really. Open, bright and strangely innocent. It’s the expression Sam wears when he’s feeling particularly happy and content, and Dean doesn’t want to see it now. Not on this lying, betraying, _murdering_ Sam’s face.

The expression tugs at a tangled knot of grieving, hurt love in Dean’s chest all the same.

Then Sam says, “Because I want a kiss.”

Oh, fuck that.

Like Dean’s going to kiss Sam with the memory of that poor girl ( _Maggie, her name was Maggie_ ) fresh in his head. Like he’s going to kiss Sam after he drugged Dean, and mind-whammied him, and let that yellow-eyed bastard have him—for weeks. Weeks spent chained to that bed while the TV ran constantly and forced him to soak in all of Sam’s crimes.

No, not Sam’s. As hurt and angry as he is, Dean recognizes that this mess belongs to him. He should have seen what Sam was up to. He should have stopped him.

Fuck, Dad _warned_ him about this. He told Dean to watch out for Sam. Too fucking bad Dean was too busy taking it up the ass from Sammy to keep a better eye on him.

Dean struggles with an overwhelming tsunami of guilt for a few seconds and then somehow manages to shove it away for the time being. With any luck, he can keep it away until he’s somewhere he can safely deal with what’s happened. With what he’s done and failed to do.

Right now, he has other things to deal with. Like the fact that Sam is still looking at him expectantly—like that was actually a serious answer he gave.

“Life’s full of little disappointments,” Dean says, and takes another step toward the door.

The smile on Sam’s face fades. His eyes narrow and something—some stray pulse of heat—shifts in the air. Dean can’t quantify the change, isn’t sure what’s causing it, but suddenly the hairs on the backs of his arms and neck are raised and his skin is prickling all over.

And is it just him, or is the golden gleam of Sam’s eyes shining even brighter than before?

Sam opens his mouth to say something and is interrupted by the noiseless pulse of light that blooms behind the curtains covering the window. The shockwave hits the room a heartbeat later, rattling the panes of glass in their frames but miraculously not shattering them. The walls and ground shake, forcing Dean to take a staggering step to keep his feet. Paintings slip their hooks and crash onto the carpet; the lamp on the nightstand falls over. The initial quake calms quickly to a lingering rumble, but the world is still overly bright through the curtains and Sam is still gazing in that direction with a displeased frown on his face.

It’s probably the best opportunity Dean is going to get.

He spins without further thought, sprinting for the door with his hand already outstretched for the chain. Something just exploded out there—bomb, maybe, as unlikely as he wants to believe that is—but it’s got to be an improvement on being shut in here with whatever Yellow Eyes’ blood has done to Sam. Besides, once Dean gets the door open, he’ll be able to assess the situation properly and make his move from there.

Dean has the chain unlatched and the bolt pulled back within moments, sweat beading on the back of his neck from the certainty that Sam must have turned around by now, that he must be approaching, and then he wrenches the door open and throws himself out into—

—Hell.

The sky overhead is red. Dean stares for a second before he realizes that’s because it’s covered with black, twisting smoke, and that the smoke is being lit up from below by fire. So much fire. It looms on the horizon, towering over the buildings across the street and the trees lining the sidewalks and slapping at the sky with twisting pillars of flame. On the corner, almost out of Dean’s line of sight, is a particularly bright inferno—there’s a metal sign rising from the flames, and Dean has time to read CIT- before the sign creaks and crashes down. Gas station, then; must have been what exploded a second before.

He registers the people next: a stream of humanity flowing down the street in a panicked rush. They’re pedestrians mostly, although there are some cars trying to weave through the masses—and one SUV plowing ahead full speed and mowing down people when they don’t get out of the way fast enough. Dean can’t hear the dull thunk of metal hitting bodies, not over the screaming and the roar of the fire, but his mind helpfully adds the sound effect in anyway.

As he stares, horrified, more fire spills into sight, moving along the street from the direction the people are fleeing. It’s even brighter than the rest: drawn out into an elongated serpent shape and blazing a whitish-gold color. The fire spills over the people, it roars through them, and the fleeing mass of humanity seems to boil as those further ahead in the crowd realize the nearness of the danger.

A man cuts away from the street to run for the glass door of the convenience mart across from the motel and a smaller tongue of golden flame lashes after him. It wraps around his waist before he has gone more than a few steps and drags him screaming into the middle of the inferno. More flames pour over one of the creeping cars—Dean sees a screaming family of four inside, and then they’re gone, buried beneath the fire with an almost insignificant sound of shattering glass as the heat blows in the windows.

Another man breaks from the pack to sprint across the relatively empty motel parking lot, directionless in his panic, and is knocked down by an inky, lightning-shot cloud streaming down from overhead. He rolls over onto his back, hands held up in self-defense, and the cloud thrusts past his lips and down his throat. The man is close enough for Dean to see his throat rippling with its passage, to see the black filling up his eyes—a demon, fuck, that’s what that was, and there are more of them shooting down now, moving in and out of the roaring flame.

Dean stares out into the inferno ( _night? day? no way to tell_ ) and feels nothing more than dull, cold horror. There are kids out there, struggling to keep up with their parents, to keep from getting trampled, and he doesn’t move. His mind is too busy trying to process the nightmare.

An arm wraps around his midsection, yanking him backwards, and before Dean can think to resist, the door slams shut again. The sounds of the screams and the fire cut off in a way that should have been impossible in a place like this, with walls that Dean knows from experience are thin enough to hear each and every grunt as the next-door neighbors pound their bed against the wall. It isn’t even hot in here, although Dean can feel sweat drenching his front—the intense heat outside registering now only in its absence.

Dean’s still stunned enough to be unresisting as he’s turned and shoved back against the door. It’s Sam in front of him, of course, Sam looming over him with eyes the same color as that snake-like fire outside and a furious clenched jaw.

“I said, ‘don’t’,” Sam says, leaning in close with one hand braced on either side of Dean’s head. “It’s not safe.”

Not safe? People are being eaten alive by some sort of living, sentient fire monster out there, demons are whizzing around possessing people, and all Sam can say is ‘it’s not safe’?

Dean’s brain has taken a while to absorb all of that, but he’s getting a handle on it now and he pushes Sam back. Now there’s room to move—room to turn—and Dean does. Dean turns, reaching for the door knob again—he has to get out there, try and direct some of the fleeing refugees, maybe figure out if he can do anything to stop the fire—and something clamps over his body, locking him in place.

“No,” Sam says—snarls, really, and Jesus Christ, that’s _Sam_ holding him still. It has to be Sam. There aren’t any demons in the room.

It isn’t that Dean doesn’t remember being felt up and invaded by his brother’s power when he was chained to the bed. Or that he’s forgotten how those demons literally exploded around him. Or even that Sam hasn’t immobilized him with a word before—hasn’t pulled Ansem’s Jedi mindtricks to keep him complacent while Sam cut him open and painted him with his own blood. But this—this freezing, implacable weight that goes right through Dean’s muscles and into his bones—is still something that he associates with that yellow-eyed son of a bitch.

To have it done to him by Sam is… Fuck, it’s beyond wrong.

And those people. Christ, _all those people_.

“Let me go,” Dean says, forcing the words out through clenched teeth as his mind races.

Sewers. There have to be sewers under the road out there, and if Dean can get out there, if he can pry up one of the manhole covers, he can maybe give some of those people a fighting chance.

“You promise you’ll stay in the room?”

It’s probably the stupidest thing Sam’s ever asked him, but Dean doesn’t have a moment to waste on a sarcastic response. Instead, he repeats, “ _Let me go_.” He’s using his pissed off, ‘you’re in for it now’ voice this time—the one that’s always been enough to get Sam to back down, except that night in the graveyard, when it suddenly wasn’t.

The same, bitter taste of futility that Dean tasted then floods his mouth again now as Sam’s hand settles on his waist. Sam’s fingers stroke skin that Dean doesn’t even have enough control over right now to twitch.

“It’ll take a few hours for everything to settle down,” Sam says, bumping his nose against the corner of Dean’s jaw. “How about we pass the time together? You could give me that kiss… let me massage some of this tension out of your body.”

It’s too absurd for Dean to really believe. That the world is crumbling apart outside, that people—kids—are dying, and Sam actually thinks Dean is going to be okay with staying in here. That he’s going to make out with his murderer of a brother while the city burns.

 _It’s not Sam_ , he thinks distantly. _It looks like him and it sounds like him, but no way in hell is that Sam._

But his memories of Sam—all those years of ingrained, instinctual recognition of the man behind him—are too strong for him to believe that. It’s Sam. Twisted and insane, yeah. Capable of only God knows what. But still Sammy. Somewhere.

“How about you let me go and we do our job?” he counters—not a lot of hope in the words getting through, but his mental struggles to free himself aren’t doing anything but exhausting and frustrating him.

Sam sighs, like Dean just disappointed him—like _Dean_ disappointed _him_ , Christ—and Dean feels something brush against his thoughts. Something that burns brighter than the sun and tastes like honeyed fire.

“This is for your own good,” Sam says, and before Dean can reply, everything goes dark.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

He wakes up again to silence.

He’s lying on the bed with the rumpled sheets, still wearing nothing but those ridiculous pajama bottoms. This time, there’s no moment of confused disconnect. He knows where he is, he remembers everything, and he jerks upright in the bed with his heart suddenly lodged in his throat.

The lamp that fell over when the gas station exploded is gone. Sam must have cleaned it up before sitting in the armchair where he is now. He has his hands steepled under his chin as he watches Dean, and Dean has the unnerving impression that Sam spent most of the time when he was out doing that.

God, Dean hopes that’s all Sam did. He’s still wearing pants, which is a good sign, but Sam hasn’t exactly been opaque about just why he wants Dean around—asking for a fucking kiss, of all things. Unless… Dean swallows as a new thought occurs to him.

Unless he’s just playing with Dean. Waiting for him to let his guard down just a little bit so that he can laugh when he burns Dean alive the way he burned all those people out there.

The thought doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense, but Dean can’t decipher Sam’s behavior any other way. If Sam really does still want to fuck him, then why doesn’t he just hold Dean down and do it? He could, easily enough, and Dean finds it pretty damn unlikely that a guy can be fine with mass murder but stick at rape.

 _What the fuck do you want from me?_ The question trembles on Dean’s lips, then dies unspoken as he notices that the door to the room is open.

Dean can’t see much through it from this angle. It looks dark out there, though. Dark and still.

Maybe Dean imagined the inferno before. Maybe it was nothing but a nightmare. Maybe his year passed and the hounds came for him and this is Hell.

Please, _please_ let this be Hell.

Dean shuts his eyes again—not to sleep, just to consider his options, to consider _Sam_ —and tries not to think about how easily his brother subdued him. He tries not to think about the nightmare ( _hallucination please oh please_ ) he saw before Sam knocked him out, and what might have happened since to leave such peaceful silence on the other side of the door.

“Go ahead,” Sam says, startling Dean’s eyes open again. “Take a look.”

Sam hasn’t moved, and his face and voice are giving absolutely nothing away, but suddenly Dean doesn’t want anything to do with whatever’s outside. He doesn’t want to fill the blank space in his mind in with reality. It’s like that thing with the cat in the box. Sam tried explaining the concept to Dean one night when they were both drunk off their asses, and while Dean didn’t get it then, suddenly it makes perfect sense.

As long as you don’t open the box up, the cat’s still alive. Even if you know in your leaden, sinking heart that it’s dead.

Dean doesn’t want to look. He doesn’t want to know.

Driven by the same masochistic compulsion that has always forced him to face his failures, he gets up from the bed anyway. He walks slowly, hyper aware of the slight scratch of the carpet against the soles of his bare feet. The pressure of silence against his ears creates the false impression of a roar that quiets only when Dean comes to a stop just inside the doorway.

From here, he can see that the sky is no longer red. It’s black, smoke-choked and charred. By the quality of the light, Dean thinks it might be dawn, although there’s too much smoke to be sure. Depending on how thick the cover is, it might be as late as midmorning. Hell, it might be noon.

At any rate, there’s sufficient illumination to see, and Dean looks across a wide swath of ruin at the gutted bones of the convenience store that used to stand on the opposite side of the street. The street itself and the motel parking lot are pitted with deep runnels that gleam sullenly in the dim light; like the ocean floor reflecting moonlight from miles above. The asphalt has actually melted and been refined to something like glass in the wake of the fire’s passage.

Ash drifts through the air like dirty snow, but the overwhelming smell isn’t of burnt tar or wood. Instead, burnt copper clogs the faint breeze. There shouldn’t be any of that scent, shouldn’t be any blood left to flavor the air after that much fire, but somehow there is. Somehow, there are drying stains everywhere Dean looks—splashes of arterial spray on the ruined crumble of a wall and thick clots stuck to the blackened frame of a hatchback sedan.

And there are demons. There are black-eyed men and women moving over the twisted wreckage of the world like ants on a carcass—picking up bones and melted chunks of metal. Moving bones and metal into separate piles, sometimes tearing fillings from a skull before tossing it in with the other remains.

The rushing roar returns as abruptly as it stopped. The world wavers, then swims upwards, and a moment later Dean’s body jars with the impact of knees hitting pavement. He realizes that he’s kneeling in the doorway, half in and half out of the room. His mouth is dry; his stomach is too knotted for nausea.

This isn’t real. This can’t be real.

But no matter how long he stares at the wasteland in front of him, it doesn’t fade.

The demons are becoming aware of him now, turning toward him and slowly allowing their scavenged spoils to fall from their arms. Dean registers their sluggish approach in a distant corner of his mind—all those beetle-dark eyes focused on him, all that hungry malice—but he can’t make himself move. Dozens—maybe hundreds—of demons are converging on him, and he…

Fuck, let them have him if it means he won’t have to process this horror any longer.

There’s a woman near him now—red hair, slightly overweight. She has a wedding band on one hand, which means she used to be someone’s wife—maybe used to be someone’s mother. Her homely face is twisted up in an enthralled, ravenous leer that makes her skin look like a mask. Her black eyes glitter as she reaches for him.

Fire licks forward over Dean’s shoulder, meeting her fingers and quickly winding up her arm. Her expression doesn’t shift at all as the fire eats through her body, flesh and bones charring to ash. Smoke bubbles out as her body flakes away—the demon within—and strains forward. It’s still reaching for Dean, will do God only knows what when it touches him, but Dean doesn’t even think of moving. The ash from the woman’s body is getting on his face, tangling in his lashes and finding its way between his slightly parted lips, and he can’t think past that fact.

“ **No.** ”

Sam’s command crackles through the air along with something heavy and hot, and the cloud reaching for Dean just… it just disintegrates.

Something about that—either the heavy, hot thing in the air, or the sight of a demon crumbling into nothingness—gets through to Dean’s shocked, numbed mind. His thoughts whir to life again just as another demon steps into the pile of ash that the woman left behind. This one is a man, somewhere in his early twenties. He’s staring at Dean like Dean is a whipped-cream bikini-clad stripper with a cherry on top, and Dean flinches back even before another lick of flame spills from the room behind him ( _from Sam_ ) and attaches itself to the man’s reaching hand like a burr.

This time, it happens faster—fire burrowing into the man’s skin and consuming him from the inside out. No demon emerges from the crumbling ash. Likely because after that tightly contained burn, there wasn’t any demon left to emerge.

More hands reach for Dean, more demons near the open doorway, and Dean hears Sam make a frustrated, furious noise from behind him. A moment later the demons stop—every last one of them, for as far as Dean can see. An extended, frozen silence follows—long enough for Dean to note the same ravenous, greedy expression mirrored on each black-eyed face—and then the demons go up in instantaneous pillars of white fire.

The heat from the closest demons bakes Dean’s skin. The sound of their crackling flesh sears his ears. By now, his mind has caught up enough for his stomach to heave uncertainly at the sight of skin and muscle and bone peeling back into snakeskin-long flakes of ash.

He lifts a hand to his mouth, bending forward so that he doesn’t puke on himself, and is caught by a hand on his arm. The hand—Sam’s hand—lifts him, hauling Dean back inside and slamming the door on the ash and fire-choked world. Dean staggers, his mind only just starting to come back on line, and doesn’t struggle when Sam’s hands pat up and down his body with frantic speed.

“You’re okay,” Sam murmurs under his breath in an absent, self-directed tone. “They didn’t touch you. I stopped them. You’re safe. You’re okay.”

Belatedly, Dean understands that Sam is touching him. Then the fact that he doesn’t want to be touched by Sam right now registers, and he smacks Sam’s hands away.

“Don’t,” he says, and means to follow up with ‘touch me’, but never gets a chance.

His mouth snaps shut under an immense, invisible pressure. The air around his body thrums and hardens, freezing him in place. Some unknown force holding Dean still for Sam, who at least isn’t touching him anymore, although he’s sure as hell hovering close enough to. His eyes are narrowed, gold and glittering and filling Dean’s field of view.

“You’re mine,” Sam says. “I _bought_ you. You belong to me.”

There’s nothing sane in Sam’s voice. There’s barely anything human in his expression, which is close enough to the hunger that Dean saw on the demons outside to make Dean’s skin crawl. He wonders again what Sam wants from him. He wonders how much Sam is going to take.

And there isn’t one damn thing Dean could do to stop him.

 _I have to get out of here_ , Dean thinks again, with an edge of panting desperation that he doesn’t care for. The whole situation is too surreal—the world outside, Dean’s own fear, the fact that it’s Sam doing this to him. Dean changed his diapers. Just a few weeks ago, he received a blowjob from Sam that was gentle and tender enough to melt stone—Sam blew him and then, afterward, he cried. Dean held Sam close while Sam kept on saying he was okay, it was just an eyelash.

But Dean didn’t sleep all that deeply that night, and every time he came awake again in the dark room, Sam was wakeful and watching him, like Dean was going to disappear if he looked away for even an instant. Once, Dean even woke to Sam’s hand on his throat—two fingers pressing lightly against his pulse, making sure his heartbeat was steady and even.

That Sam and this one aren’t the same person. They can’t be.

“Tell me,” Sam urges, seemingly oblivious to Dean’s inner struggle to understand everything that has happened. “Tell me who you belong to.”

The pressure on Dean’s jaw loosens and he uses the freedom to ignore Sam’s Crazy and say, “You killed those people.”

Sam looks surprised by the response. He takes a step back, giving Dean some much-needed room, and cocks his head with a frown. “Demons. Dean, you don’t—”

“Not them,” Dean interrupts, although he sort of wants to remind Sam that there were people burning up in those meatsuits alongside the demons. “Before. The—that was you. The fire. And I—I saw the news. Cleveland. Detroit. New Orleans.”

Sam’s expression brightens with comprehension, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t explain everything away like Dean wishes he would.

Dean’s throat tightens with a sudden ache, and he has to swallow before he can add, “You killed that girl.”

And just like that, it’s real. Everything is shatteringly, irrefutably real. Armageddon is here and Sam summoned it up. Hell, Sam is riding at the front on all four of the horsemen’s steeds.

There are no take backs on something like this. Not for Sam. Not for Dean. Not for anyone.

Pain shoots through Dean’s chest—worse, his eyes sting and his vision swims. He’s crying, which he hates to do at the best of times, but fucking loathes right now. Tears are such a useless response in the face of a disaster of this magnitude—there’s already been so much destruction and death, and all Dean can do is stand here wrapped up in what he’s beginning to recognize as his brother’s power and cry like a little girl.

Fucking pathetic.

“I needed a life,” Sam says, his voice pitched at a low, soothing level. “Dean, I needed to save you—”

“Not like this,” Dean insists, his voice choked with the weight of his grief and betrayal and the first faint, hot stirrings of anger. God damn Sam. God damn him for being stupid enough to think this was at all okay. “Not—you should have let them take me.”

Sam is there again, unexpectedly snarling in Dean’s face and gripping his throat with one oversized hand. It’s nothing like the tender, fearful touch Dean was remembering only moments before. No, this is all force and demand and bruising strength.

“Don’t you say that,” Sam growls. “Not ever again.”

“You should have let them take me,” Dean repeats without hesitation. The words come out choked and hoarse past the crush of Sam’s fingers, but Dean ignores the pain in his throat in an attempt to catch and hold Sam’s eyes. He has to make Sam see; he has to get through to him. It’s too late to take those deaths back, but it isn’t too late to stop Sam’s downward spiral. Dean can—he can pull Sam back from this. Sam can pull himself free from the madness, he can set aside his newfound powers, and they’ll—Dean will find some way to put it right.

But instead, Sam makes an inarticulate sound of fury, and his hand tightens around Dean’s throat, and the world blacks out.

Again.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Dean swims back into awareness for the third time with difficulty. It really is like forcing his way up through heavy water—some immense pressure on him, unfocused but relentless. Urging him to stay down in the dark.

It’s whispering to him with Sam’s voice.

When Dean opens his eyes, he’s on the bed once more—on those too soft black sheets that don’t belong with the rest of the motel room. When he swallows, his throat doesn’t seem bruised the way he thinks it should be. As the last lingering threads of darkness fall away from him, he realizes that he isn’t alone in the room.

He can’t be alone, because somewhere close, a woman is screaming.

Dean jerks upright, twisting around in the direction the sound. The instinctive urge to help has tensed his muscles, and his right hand shoves under the pillow for a knife that should be there, but isn’t. Just about the same moment his fingers close on nothing, the view in front of him clicks together like a Magic Eye picture. Dean makes a low, choked sound as his body locks up on him.

It’s the same motel room he already woke up in twice before, but everything is suddenly the wrong color. The entire left ride of the room has gone red and dripping, and there are—there are _chunks_ all over the place. Even at a glance, Dean can tell there’s too much meat to belong to one person. Someone’s ribcage is on the dresser, a scalp is stuck to the far wall, and Sam is… Sam’s…

“Another,” Sam snarls as the screaming finally trails off into a gurgle. He straightens, turning around—turning toward the demon, where the yellow-eyed bastard is standing at attention with its back against the door. There’s a curved knife in Sam’s blood-slicked hand.

Dean gave Sam that blade. Dean gave it to him for his fourteenth birthday, Dean spent two years teaching him to use it in a fight, and Sam just—he—

Dean isn’t aware of having done so, but he must make some sort of noise because Sam’s head twists around. Sam’s golden eyes peer at Dean from beneath a mask of scarlet.

And then Sam takes a step forward, reaching, and Dean’s mind backpedals in horror. It jerks sideways—seeing Sam like this is too fucking much; he’s opting out. Jesus, he can actually feel himself losing it.

“No,” Sam says hastily.

Golden warmth loops around Dean’s mind and hauls him forward again. When his mind tries to slide sideways around the loops, they pull tighter, keeping him present in the room, and sane, and forcing him to comprehend that his baby brother, the love of his life, is standing in the middle of his butchery with the knife Dean gave him clenched in one hand.

Dean can’t be here. He can’t. He fucking _can’t_.

This time, his mind jerks at Sam’s hold, twisting and writhing in the direction of the insane abyss he senses yawning just out of reach. The sensation of being wrapped in gold redoubles. The gold smothers him, clinging to his thoughts and making them heavy. For a long moment, actually, there are no thoughts at all. Everything just stops. Dean’s brain stops, his lungs, his heart, and death sweeps near to take him.

“Too much,” the demon’s voice comes as the room fades—tinged with panic for some reason, now why would that be?

The gold immediately withdraws at the rebuke—not completely, but enough for the room to lighten, and for Dean to involuntarily gasp in a breath. His heart kicks in his chest, starting up again. The power suffocating his mind unravels somewhat, keeping a firm grasp on Dean’s sanity, but easing just enough for him to think through the golden glow.

“He was—he can’t go,” Sam says. He sounds young suddenly. Confused and scared and petulant with his own fear. He sounds the way he used to, back when he was just a kid insisting there were monsters in his closet and Dean had to stay the night. “Keep him here. I need him.”

 _I’m right here, Sammy,_ Dean thinks, before the situation reasserts itself and he remembers that he can’t protect Sam from what’s happening. He can’t protect him from himself.

“You’re doing fine,” the demon says. “You just need to learn a little more finesse, kiddo. You’re packing more of a punch than you’re used to.”

“He’s mine,” Sam insists, sounding just as confused but less frightened. The glow lessens again, giving Dean enough of his sight back to see that Sam’s attention is fixed on him. The knife is an afterthought in Sam’s hand; he seems to have forgotten he’s even holding it.

“Yeah, slugger,” the demon says in a soothing voice. “All yours.”

It moves away from the door a step, moving closer to Sam, and Sam’s eyes flick toward it. He moves, shifting his body closer to the bed—putting himself, Dean realizes muzzily, between Dean and the demon. Sam’s body is half turned away from him, but Dean can see enough of his brother’s face to note the defensive snarl on Sam’s mouth.

“He’s safe from me,” the demon says, keeping its hands in plain sight and its movements slow. “You know he’s safe from me. Come on, Sam. Use that noggin of yours.”

Sam’s head tilts to the side in a startlingly animalistic gesture and then, slowly, his lips uncurl. He gives himself a full-bodied shake, sending blood and—is that lightning?—off of his skin in a splattering shower. His hand moves on the knife with fresh awareness.

“What—” Sam says, and then stops. “What was that?”

“You’re still adjusting,” the demon tells him. “And you’ve been indulging yourself. There are bound to be a couple of rocky moments until you finish sorting everything out in that oversized brain of yours. It was better this time, though, wasn’t it?”

Sam shakes his head, like the answer to that question is ‘no’, but he doesn’t actually speak. He looks down at the knife in his hand, then over at the mess he made out of the left side of the room. As his attention wavers, his hold on Dean slips further, giving him enough control over his body to shift against the soft sheets.

“You want another one?” the demon asks as it sidles even closer to Sam. “I’ve got a waitress just outside. She looks like a real screamer.”

Oh, fuck.

“’am,” Dean manages, forcing his brother’s name out through numb lips. “No.”

Sam pivots with a smooth, graceful motion unlike anything Dean has seen from him before. His eyes seek Dean out, pinning him to the bed beneath their considering weight, and then Sam nods.

Not at Dean, though. Dean can tell that much even before his brother’s mouth curves in a terrifyingly bland smile.

“I need this, Dean,” Sam says as the demon unobtrusively lets itself out of the room. “You upset me, and I need this now.”

“That’s right,” Dean agrees. It’s easier to speak this time—Sam consciously easing up on the compulsion even more or Dean’s efforts working through it. “ _I_ upset you. _Me._ You want to tear into someone, I’m right here.”

Sam stares at him for a moment, expression unreadable beneath the blood, and then comes forward. Dean means to stay still and accepting—he asked for this, after all—but his survival instinct kicks in and he thrashes beneath Sam’s power. The weight on him immediately increases, a sensation that only prods him into more frantic attempts to escape. He strains violently enough that he feels one of the muscles in his shoulder tear with a horrible, sharp spasm of pain.

His body hasn’t moved at all. He hasn’t even shaken the mattress.

He’s trapped. Trapped and staked out in front of Sam’s advance like a rabbit before a ravenous wolf.

Dean’s breathing shifts into something harsh and low. He can smell himself sweating, an instinctive fear response to the bloody figure’s menacing approach—to the knife still dripping scarlet beads onto the floor. Part of him—a big part of him—can’t believe this is happening.

That’s Sam over there. That’s his little brother, Sammy, who couldn’t handle gutting deer on a simple hunting trip and had to go puke behind a tree while Dean and Caleb dressed the kill. That’s the kid who used to turn oversized, limpid eyes on Dean whenever they arrived on the scene a day late and a dollar short. That’s the guy who spent almost a solid night crying because he had to put down a doomed werewolf in Frisco.

But Sam killed that girl in the graveyard no sweat, and she was just a person. She wasn’t evil or infected or possessed. He’s killed more civilians since—thousands of innocents at a conservative estimate. The sheen of blood covering him makes for a pretty good argument that, whoever Sam may have been in the past, the demon’s blood has transformed him into a monster more than capable of turning a blade on his own brother.

Sam is standing over Dean now, extending the knife toward him. Dean’s helpless to do anything but watch as the dripping blade comes toward his face. He can’t even flinch as it comes to rest against his cheek. The metal is warmer than he thought it would be—from the blood coating it, of course, and more of that blood is dribbling down on Dean’s skin. It trickles along his jaw, down the side of his throat.

Dean squeezes his eyes shut and swallows carefully, trying to screw up his courage. He won’t scream. He isn’t going out like some panicked civilian.

But the vicious sting of parting flesh doesn’t come. Sam is just holding the blade there, resting the flat of it against Dean’s cheek. When it finally moves, it traces over his skin only lightly—a faint scrape that makes Dean’s arms and the back of his neck break out in goosebumps.

“You really think I could hurt you?” Sam asks in a quiet voice.

There’s heat riding the words—not anger, but something even more terrifying. Something low and intimate. Something Dean isn’t prepared to see in Sam when he’s like this, after he just finished butchering someone—several someones, from the amount of carnage splattering the room. It’s there anyway, though, and Dean can’t ignore it because Sam’s power is sliding over his chest and stomach in a warm, heavy caress that leaves no room for Dean to doubt his intentions.

Dean envisions the rumpled bed again in his mind, and his gut lurches. Fuck, is this what Sam wants him for?

It might not be the only thing—probably isn’t; even in the midst of his unsettled fear, he understands that this new Sam wouldn’t have any problem finding someone to get his rocks off with—but it’s at least some of what Sam wants from him. The only question, really, is how this Sam wants it. And how many pieces Dean’s going to be in when he’s done.

He swallows again, trying to keep still as his mind frantically searches for a way out of here. The knife on his face keeps getting in the way, though, and the heavy press of power over his front, and the ghost of Sam’s breath over Dean’s mouth.

 _Fuck,_ Dean thinks. _Fuck fuck fuckity fuck—_

“Look at me.”

Looking at Sam is pretty much the last thing Dean wants to do right now, but he also isn’t going to argue with the psychopath wielding the pointy object, so he forces his eyes open reluctantly.

Sam is bent close enough for Dean to discern features beneath the blood mask. Being able to recognize his brother so clearly makes everything worse, and Dean forgets to worry about himself as his insides knot into a tangle of rage and guilt and low, keening grief.

He should have noticed what his deal was doing to Sam. He should have stopped Sam before it got this far. He should have offed himself before Sam got within a thousand miles of that damned graveyard.

Why the fuck couldn’t that crossroads bitch have made it an even trade?

“I could never hurt you,” Sam says once he sees he has Dean’s attention. The knife tip trails down from Dean’s cheek onto his throat. “I’d cut out my own heart first.”

Dean blinks away the mental image of Sam doing just that and hurriedly replies, “You _are_ hurting me. This—what you’re doing here—this is hurting me. You have to stop. Just—just put down the knife and let’s talk.”

Sam blinks and the pressure of the blade, already tentative, becomes feather light. Hope blooms in Dean’s chest with a deep, bruising ache—Sam’s listening; Dean got through—and loosens his muscles as Sam stands up.

“You’re right,” Sam says.

Oh thank God.

“Great,” Dean breathes. “Great, okay. So just let me up and we’ll talk this over.”

Sam nods, lifting the arm with the knife and wiping his forearm across the bridge of his nose. With his arms just as red as his face, the motion doesn’t do much to clean anything.

It takes Dean a few moments to get that the force holding him immobile hasn’t let up at all.

“You have a lot to absorb right now,” Sam says as Dean starts to lose his happy thoughts again. “This is—this is too much for you.”

Behind Sam, the door to the motel room opens to reveal the demon. The son of a bitch is gripping a girl by the arm. The girl is bound and gagged and wearing a waitress outfit—one of the old diner uniforms, with the skirts and the aprons. She has brown hair and mascara-smeared, wet eyes. She’s pretty.

And probably not a day over twenty.

Sam doesn’t turn to look at her, but he hasn’t put down the knife, either. He’s looking down at Dean, waiting for him to get it. Waiting for him to understand what’s about to happen.

“No,” Dean protests. As the demon drags the girl into the room, he fights to move—if he can just stand up, he can—he can do something. Anything. “Sam. Sam, don’t.”

“Next time,” Sam says coolly, “Maybe you’ll think twice before pissing me off.”

“No,” Dean blurts. “No no no no. Don’t. Sam—”

“Go to sleep, Dean,” Sam interrupts, wiping the flat of the knife as clean as he can get it with a corner of his shirt. “I’ll finish up here and then we can have that talk you wanted.”

The girl has gotten a good look at the room now, and she’s screaming loudly enough that Dean can hear her through the gag. His head spins. Helpless panic and horror stain the inside of his mouth with a metallic, coppery flavor.

“No,” he says, working his way up to a shout of his own. “You son of a bitch, don’t you do this. Sam. Sa—”

The black rolls up and sucks him under before he can say any more.


	2. Chapter 2

The fourth time Dean wakes up, he’s in a car. The scent and the worn spring in the seatback he’s leaning against tell him quickly enough that it’s _his_ car. A moment’s thought reveals that he’s sitting in the passenger seat with his hands at a weird angle—wrists bound with rope and lashed to the door handle. He’s dressed again, jeans and a t-shirt. Boots. The car is in motion, the world dark beyond the windows when Dean cracks his eyes.

There’s a ghost keeping pace with the car outside: a pale reflection warped by the glass but still clearly recognizable as Dean’s brother. Sam’s at the wheel, then—cleaned up, at least, Dean has that much to be thankful for. His baby deserves better than to be polluted by innocent blood.

Terror lurks at the back of his throat—fuck, Sam’s been handling him so fucking easily, dropping Dean into the dark on a whim. Dean hasn’t ever been this outmatched, and that isn’t even taking into account what he knows is a very real handicap on his part. For all his urgent thoughts about getting his hands on a weapon earlier, Dean doesn’t know whether he can actually hurt Sam.

Christ, he doesn’t want to find out.

Dean considers feigning sleep while he tests his bonds, but before he can make a decision, Sam says, “Hey, man. You hungry?”

Dean doesn’t bother wondering if he made some kind of noise when he woke up. Mostly because he senses that it wouldn’t have mattered if he kept quiet as a mouse.

Sam knows he’s awake because Sam is permitting him to be awake.

Despair lurches through Dean in a black miasma and he pushes it away. Helpless or not, he isn’t giving up.

“There’s a diner up ahead—one of those 24-hour places you like.”

Dean isn’t tempted to reply. He keeps his mouth shut and his face turned away from his brother. He considers how fast they’re moving—sixty miles per hour, according to the glance he sneaks toward the dash—and tries to get a glimpse of the terrain outside. Sixty is a little fast for survival even with flat, soft grass as a landing site, but if Sam is planning on stopping, he’ll have to slow down first. And those are woods Dean’s looking at. He could probably lose Sam in there, if he gets enough of a head start. Depending on the limits of the power Sam has been throwing around.

Maybe Sam has to be able to see Dean to mojo him.

In what he hopes is a surreptitious manner, Dean works his wrists against the ropes. The drag of the nylon against his skin burns, but Dean’s had worse. Hell, he had worse when Sam cut him the other night and then used his blood as finger paint. And right now, Dean’s feeling desperate enough that he’d seriously consider chewing off his own thumb if it meant he’d be able to slip a hand free.

“I know you’re upset with me,” Sam says abruptly into the quiet, “but the whole silent treatment thing is just childish. I mean, I thought you wanted to talk.”

Dean almost keeps his mouth shut on principle, but the urge to fight back using the only route open to him is too strong.

“You want to talk, Sam?” he shoots back as he twists his right hand around in a maneuver that should loosen the knots in the rope, given enough time. He tilts his body further away from Sam, trying to hide the corkscrewing motion of his hands, as he continues, “How about you explain how you ever thought this was a good idea? How about you explain to that girl back there why she had to die?”

It’s meant as a jab—it’s meant to draw at least a little blood—but Sam doesn’t sound angry at all when he says, “I was thinking more along the lines of discussing our current situation, and your place within it. You seem to be a little… confused.”

“I’m tied to the door with my homicidal brother behind the wheel,” Dean says in a level, dry voice that hopefully conveys just how thrilled he is with this situation. “I think I’m pretty clear on ‘my place’.”

The words have barely left his lips before the car unexpectedly swerves over onto the grass-covered strip between road and forest with a series of rattling bumps. Biting out a swear, Dean stops working his hands against the rope and grips the door handle instead, hanging on tightly as the Impala’s brakes squeal to a stop. Sam puts the car in park, then twists in the driver’s seat and puts one elbow up on the seatback.

“No, Dean,” he says. “You’re not. If you were, I wouldn’t have to bother tying you to anything.”

“No one asked you to play Bondage Barney now,” Dean mutters, and then shuts up as Sam leans in even closer, eyes narrowed and burning in the dimly lit car.

“Do you even understand what happened that night in the graveyard?” Sam asks. “Do you know what I did?”

As if Dean could forget.

“You killed someone. You killed an innocent girl.”

“ _I bought you_ ,” Sam corrects vehemently. “And now you’re mine. I _own_ you, Dean.”

It’s such a ridiculous claim that Dean has barked an incredulous, humorless laugh before he has really finished absorbing the words.

Undaunted in the face of Dean’s disbelief, Sam continues, “Now, I know this is going to be difficult for you to adjust to. You’ve always valued the illusion of independence. But really, it’s better this way. You’ve never liked making decisions on your own. Now you don’t have to. You were always worried about me leaving you—but I’m never going to give you up. And you’re not going to Hell. You sold your soul to them, but I bought it back. That makes it mine. That makes you mine.”

Sam’s been talking this same sort of crazy possessive crap off and on since Dean woke up on the floor of the motel room, but this is the first time it really penetrates. Maybe it’s because this is the first time that Dean has adjusted enough to the horror of what’s happened to be able to internalize Sam’s babbling. Or maybe just because this is the first time Sam has said the words with such deep, unflinching conviction while pinning Dean against the side of the door with his heavy gaze.

He’s serious, Dean realizes. He’s actually serious about this whole ownership thing. Like Dean’s some kind of toy or a—a shiny new car.

Crazy as it is, Sam means what he’s saying. He means it right down to his bones.

Chill ice washes down Dean’s spine. His skin breaks out into gooseflesh.

“No one fucking owns me,” he says, unease making his voice harsher than he means it to be.

Sam reaches for him and Dean starts to jerk his head back, then stops when he realizes what he’s doing. Damned if he’ll flinch from his own brother. Even if his skin crawls when Sam caresses his cheek and his breath comes in shallow, cornered pants.

“I’ve owned you all my life,” Sam says. “All I did was make it official. And the sooner you realize I’m right, the better.”

The tender murmur of his voice makes the words sound sickeningly like an endearment and Dean’s stomach curls in on itself. When Sam starts to lean in, aiming for Dean’s mouth, Dean can’t help it. He jerks back, heart hammering in his chest, and spits, “I’m not fucking kissing you.”

As soon as he’s said it, he remembers that he doesn’t necessarily have a choice. With his newfound powers, Sam could hold Dean down and take what he wants—kisses… more if he feels like it. Or he could just tell Dean to perform.

His own personal blow-up doll.

Dean’s stomach lurches even more strongly at the thought of being forced to perform acts that he used to offer willingly. He thinks of the bed back at the motel, and he wonders if Sam… if Sam already took what he wanted before he woke Dean up that first time. It didn’t feel like it—Dean’s ass was tight and dry, with not even a hint of a used ache—but that… With all the power Sam is flinging around, Dean has to admit that that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

Breathlessly, he waits for Sam to force the issue now. He waits for Sam to grip his head with weaves of power and turn his face back, waits for Sam’s mouth to cover his and force his lips open. Sam is breathing on the corner of his jaw, on the side of his throat.

“You will,” Sam says eventually. “Once you adjust, you’ll do more than that.”

He sounds just as sure about that as he is about owning Dean. He sounds even surer, actually, and terror—bristling and ice-crusted—lodges in Dean’s throat.

“Fuck you,” he croaks.

“Yes.”

It actually takes Dean a couple of fumbling moments to figure out what Sam means by that and why he sounds so smugly amused. Then his chest and stomach tighten in anger—he walked right into that, how stupid can he be?

He wants to indulge in his anger—that heat is better than the jagged ice of fear any day—but he knows better. Yelling at Sam won’t do anything but get him knocked out again. Right now, he needs to do what he can to protect himself and wait on a chance at escape. And if he’s going to protect himself, he needs to be absolutely clear on what it is he’s protecting himself from.

It’s still hard as hell forcing the question from his throat.

“That what you want from me?”

Sam hums in the back of his throat and flicks his fingers along the edge of Dean’s jaw.

Fuck.

Dean struggles with the lump of horror in his throat for several seconds and then manages to swallow it long enough to ask, “What else? What the fuck am I doing here, Sam? What do you _want_ from me?”

The seats creak as Sam leans even closer, and Dean scrunches his eyes shut, turning his face into the window. His body is a line of tension, coiling tighter as Sam’s breath huffs softly over his throat, his jaw, his cheek. He shudders when Sam’s lips brush the shell of his ear.

“Everything,” Sam murmurs. “I want _everything_.”

 _Fucking_ fuck.

Through clenched teeth, and keeping his voice as even as possible, Dean insists, “Sam, this isn’t you.”

There’s a pause where Dean’s freakishly sure that Sam isn’t going to be content with just answering his question. Sam’s mouth keeps brushing his hair; Sam’s nose nudges behind Dean’s ear as Sam takes in slow, lingering breaths. It’s like being scented by a ravenous lion, and Dean gets the sense that his brother is working himself up to _show_ Dean exactly what he’s after.

Then Sam’s fingers catch on the short fringe of Dean’s hair and tug.

“We’re going to grow this out. I want something to hold onto when you kiss me.”

Only, from the slight pause before Sam says ‘kiss’, that isn’t what he means.

Dean flushes with mingled fear and anger—Sam can’t fucking treat him like this; he doesn’t have the right.

“Tell you what,” Dean says, speaking slowly and clearly so that he doesn’t lose control of his temper and start hurling obscenities. “You stop this shit right now—untie me, point the car toward Bobby’s—and maybe, if you’re really lucky, I won’t kick your ass for being such a dick.”

Sam is silent for a moment—mouth lingering against Dean’s hair—and then he eases away.

“We’re done talking,” Sam announces as he slides back into place behind the wheel.

Now that Dean has his space again, he twists his head back around to keep Sam in sight. When he opens his mouth to argue, though, he learns how true Sam’s words are. A tight coil of power wraps around his throat before he can get so much as a syllable out, silencing his attempts to insist that they aren’t done, damn it, and that they won’t be done until Sam wakes up and smells the apocalypse.

He clenches his jaw, chewing on his betrayed, guilty anger as Sam shifts into first gear and gets the car rolling again. Beneath his anger, Dean’s heart is still beating too quickly: his entire body a jangle of nerves after Sam’s little display.

Christ, how long is Sam going to wait before he decides to just take what he wants? And how the hell is Dean going to hold onto any sense of self-respect or determination afterwards?

 _It’s just my body,_ Dean tries to reassure himself. _And Sam’s fucked me before. It won’t—it won’t be that bad._

But he thinks of the feel of Sam’s power locking his body down—Sam’s power choking his throat even now—and he knows he’s lying to himself. Sam might have fucked him before, but this—when it happens—is still going to be plenty bad.

“You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten,” Sam says offhandedly as he pulls back onto the road.

Somehow, Dean sincerely doubts it.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Yellow Eyes is waiting for them at the diner.

The son of a bitch arrived early to ‘prepare’ for them, and although there aren’t any visible bodies, it’s made no attempt to clear away the blood pools by two of the booths or the crimson spatter cobwebbing the windows. The sole surviving waitress is a sobbing mess on the floor by the counter. The cook is white-faced and sweating where he stands stiffly by the stove. Dean can see him because the diner is equipped with one of those kitchen-to-counter windows that lets impatient or curious customers watch their burgers fry. There’s even one of those spinning metal ticket holder things sitting up on the sill. There are pies underneath glass domes on the counter.

It’s a true slice of quaint Americana, just as long as Dean ignores the obvious signs of slaughter.

“Where do you want to sit?” Sam asks. His hand is a restraining, attentive pressure where it’s closed on Dean’s shoulder. His voice is cheerful, like he hasn’t even noticed the blood or the hysterical way the waitress is sobbing. Like Dean’s wrists aren’t still bound by thick coils of rope. He might not actually be tied _to_ anything right now, but he can’t even count that as an improvement.

Especially since Sam’s probably just going to lash Dean’s hands back up to the door once they’re done here.

The conflicting emotions that have been roiling in Dean’s chest and stomach ever since he rolled over on that motel room bed and found himself staring into a slaughterhouse flare hotter. They’re pulling his mind in a hundred different directions at once, an unbearable strain, and Dean has to make a choice. He has to pick one emotion to focus on before the tumult drowns everything out and the overload shuts all rational thought down completely.

He really, really doesn’t want to leave his body alone and defenseless with Sam right now.

For a moment Dean is paralyzed anyway—there are too many emotions for him to sort through, let alone control, and each one is just as strong as the next—but then his eyes catch on the waitress.

There’s stark terror etched into her down-turned face. Her eyes are open and locked on a window at the far end of the diner, but it isn’t escape she’s thinking of. Not with the foreknowledge of her own death glittering so brightly in her eyes. Her skirt and apron aren’t really all that similar to the ones the other waitress—the one Yellow Eyes dragged into that motel room—was wearing, and she has at least twenty years on that other girl, but she reminds Dean of her anyway.

She reminds Dean of what Sam has done.

His stomach settles and firms. His chest clenches and his head pounds. His hands clench reflexively, straining against the rope.

He doesn’t think he’s ever been quite this angry before.

“You want a booth?” Sam prods.

“You’re the one calling the shots here,” Dean bites out. “Sit wherever the fuck you want.”

Sam’s grip on his shoulder shifts into something startled and tentative at the hostile tone of Dean’s voice, and Dean takes the opportunity to wrench forward, out from underneath his brother’s hand. His first impulse, now that he’s free, is to grab the waitress and run, but he knows damn well that he wouldn’t make it four steps. Hell, he probably wouldn’t even make it to the waitress before Sam knocked him out. So instead he settles for making his shoulders as foreboding as possible and side stepping Sam’s attempt to reacquire him.

To his credit, Sam doesn’t make a second try. Instead, he strides past Dean to a booth midway down the diner. He slides into one side and sits facing Dean with an expectant expression on his face. It’s the same expression Sam always used to wear whenever he and Dad had been at it and he wanted Dean to intervene on his side. Demanding and not a little petulant.

That look always made Dean want to side with Dad on principle, and right now it’s giving him all sorts of ideas—mostly about the many and varied ways he can tell Sam to go fuck himself—but he can sense the demon’s presence at his back. The new, golden cast to Sam’s eyes isn’t all that reassuring either, and he thinks again of their brief stop by the side of the road. The feel of Sam’s breath on his skin.

And he remembers Sam’s warning in the motel. Sam telling Dean that maybe he should think twice before pissing him off again.

It’s difficult to call his anger to heel, but the waitress and the cook are motivation enough for Dean to manage it. With slow, measured steps, he walks down the aisle toward the booth. When he reaches it, he slides in across from Sam without hesitation and rests his bound hands on the table in full view of his brother.

Sam doesn’t seem at all bothered by the not-so-subtle accusation.

Instead, he smiles broadly and leans back, resting both arms on the back of the booth. “So, what does a guy have to do to get some service around here?” he asks in a loud, deceptively casual voice.

Dean’s back is to the front door, so he doesn’t see whatever ‘motivation’ the yellow-eyed demon provides, but he hears the waitress’s startled, pained cry clearly enough. He tenses, muscles thrumming with the instinctive urge to come to her defense, and then bites down on the inside of his cheek.

If he makes a move now, he’s only going to get her killed. Maybe the chef, too. Maybe even himself.

It both galls and terrifies Dean to acknowledge that, after all those years of thinking he knew his brother better than he knew himself, he doesn’t actually have the first clue what Sam is capable of. But he’s missed so much—was blind enough that they wound up in that graveyard, with Sam carelessly slitting a pretty girl’s throat. And after what Dean saw in that motel room, after their conversation in the car…

He isn’t willing to bet on anything right now.

After a few moments, the waitress’s sobbing nears, accompanied by the shuffling sound of her shoes on the linoleum. Dean is carefully watching his brother for any sign of inattention, waiting for a chance to scope out the lay of the place, but Sam’s eyes are locked on him with an intensity that drops Dean’s stomach. If Dean makes his quick survey now, then Sam is going to know exactly what he’s looking for.

In no possible scenario is he going to take Dean’s attempt to find an escape route well.

The longer that Dean meets Sam’s gaze, though, the more he’s tempted to look anywhere else. Sam’s eyes are promising things that make Dean’s skin prickle with fresh alarm. Sam’s expression is hinting at things Dean doesn’t understand—things he doesn’t want to understand.

He thinks again about the big question here—the one he worked the balls up to ask Sam in the car. ‘Everything’, Sam said then, but ‘everything’ is such a vague term, when Dean comes down to it. Dean is finding it difficult to accept the word at face value—in part because he doesn’t want to try to figure out what ‘everything’ would look like, but also because Sam’s behavior has all been so one-track minded.

There’s a relatively high probability that when Sam said everything, he meant it in nothing more than a sexual sense. Which is plenty for Dean to worry about, actually—especially when he has no way of knowing how quickly Sam will get tired of fucking ( _raping_ ) him, or what Sam might decide to do with him when he’s done.

And yet…

And yet, Sam’s expression seems to indicate there’s more at stake here. And Dean knows he’s a good lay, but he isn’t anywhere near good enough for the strength of Sam’s current fixation.

Is it possible that it isn’t lust driving Sam’s hunger at all, but love? _Could_ it be love? Could Sam not only still be in there, but also reaching out through the overwhelming power and madness? Could he be reaching out toward Dean, praying for him to do something, to help Sam, to save him.

Suddenly, the prospect seems more than likely. It tangles in Dean’s ribcage and claws through his stomach, leaving the ache of tension in its wake. But Dean will gladly take the desperate ache as long as it’s accompanied by the sweeter, brighter burn of hope.

 _Hang on, Sammy,_ he thinks. _I’m here. I’ve got you._

Across the table, Sam’s gaze shifts with an abruptness that leaves Dean feeling staggered. There’s no sense of having won their staring contest, though—if it even was a contest on Sam’s side. No, Sam looked away because something else caught his attention, and now, in a low, dangerous voice, he asks, “What are you looking at?”

Dean starts to follow his brother’s gaze toward the waitress and then catches himself. He was waiting for just this sort of opportunity, after all; no point in wasting it now on a momentary twinge of curiosity. God only knows how long he’ll have to scout the lay of the land.

With a hot, burning sense of urgency in his mouth, Dean looks past his brother, scanning the far end of the diner. More booths march down alongside the windows that run across three of the diner’s walls ( _the fourth wall being taken up with the kitchen and a couple Yankees pennants_ ). From the looks of them, three of the booths have only recently been evacuated and still bear half-full plates and coffee mugs.

On one plate, Dean spots a fork with a flap of fried egg still pierced on the tines. That might not necessarily mean anything—a lot of these 24-hour places serve breakfast all day—but when Dean quickly double-checks the other tables, he finds more of the same. Which means that, despite the fact that he can’t see the indicators yet, the darkness outside must be riding the close edge of dawn. The men and women who sat here eating were on the early shift, probably: getting up and coming in here to slurp down some greasy food before punching in at whatever blue collar shithole they worked in.

Dean wonders who’s going to miss them when they don’t show up, and then his eyes wander further and land on an opening in the back wall. There’s a hallway there—no telling how long from the angle Dean’s eyeballing it. But the word –TROOMS is painted on the wall in broad black strokes ( _Dean’s mind helpfully fills in the missing RES- hidden further down the hall_ ), and even more importantly, one of those ubiquitous and unmistakable red exit signs glows steadily above the door.

And from the weeks he spent washing dishes in a dump that might have been this place’s long lost and filthier twin ( _beggers can’t be choosers when they’re fourteen and working without Uncle Sam’s say-so_ ), Dean knows that the United States fire code frowns on a kitchen with only one exit. Even in the rathole he worked in, where regulations and laws were ignored on a steady basis ( _the cook, Eddie something, used to cook with a lit cigarette dangling out of his mouth_ ), people took the fire code seriously. No one wants to be burned alive like another piece of fried chicken.

Since Dean didn’t notice any other hallways at the other end of the diner when they came in, there’s a chance this diner’s secondary kitchen exit opens out onto that hallway as well. There’s nothing to say that the construction crew didn’t decide to just open a door from the kitchen directly out into the back parking lot, of course, but Dean still rates his odds at better than fifty-fifty.

Which means that Dean has a shot at getting not only himself, but both civilians out of here. Just as long as he’s careful and plays his hand with the right finesse.

Quickly, Dean shifts his attention back to Sam—he’s sure Sam will be staring at him unpleasantly, sure Sam must have noticed every last thought that just flashed over his face—but Sam hasn’t noticed his distraction. He’s still frowning at the waitress with a cold, foreboding expression. When Dean glances up at her himself, he twitches in surprise.

All of her fear has vanished. If it weren’t for the reddened whites of her eyes and the tear stains on her cheeks, Dean might have wondered if he hallucinated her earlier sobs. Her expression is entranced as she stares at Dean’s face. Her breath comes in shallow, careful sighs, as though she’s come unexpectedly on a deer less than three feet away and doesn’t want to startle it into flight. The color is high and excited in her cheeks.

Dean knows he’s good looking, and he’s used to catching stares, but not when the lady in question just witnessed a handful of murders and is certain she’s going to be next. In this situation, actually, what would otherwise have been a flattering stroke of his ego isn’t just weird: it’s _wrong_. Unnatural and stomach turning. Dean shifts uneasily, inching further toward the wall to put more distance between them.

The waitress makes a low noise in the back of her throat, moving to follow, and heat snarls through the air between them. Dean jumps as she’s thrown backwards against the counter, knocking into the red-vinyl topped stools on her way. She cries out in pain as she goes down, then clutches at an ankle that’s already swelling horribly. Broken, and badly. When Dean starts sliding out of the booth to go assess the rest of her injuries, he’s shoved back against the window with a gust of heated power.

“You don’t look at him,” Sam growls, his attention still locked on the waitress. “He’s mine, do you understand? He belongs to me.”

“I-I’m sorry,” the waitress babbles, trying to curl in on herself while babying her ankle. She lifts her left hand and uses it to cover her eyes. “I won’t look! I won’t, I’m sorry!”

“Get up.”

Dean’s gaze snaps from the girl to his brother. Sam can’t possibly be serious. Dean would have trouble standing on an ankle as badly broken as hers looks; he can’t possibly expect a civilian to shove the pain aside and keep functioning normally. They’re both lucky she isn’t screaming her head off over there.

To give her credit, the waitress tries. She pulls her uninjured leg beneath her, pushes up, and then sinks again with a whimpering cry.

“I—I c-can’t,” she chokes out as she huddles back between the stools. “It—it h-hurts. My a-ank—ankle—”

“If you can’t stand,” Sam says dispassionately, “Then you can’t walk. If you can’t walk, then you can’t wait on us, and I have absolutely no use for you.”

From the speed with which the waitress’ head snaps up, she heard the threat in Sam’s statement just as clearly as Dean. Tears pour down her face. Her lower lip trembles with despair.

“Sam,” Dean says thickly. “Sam, stop. Leave her alone.”

“Hush,” Sam replies in a distracted, absent voice.

There’s nothing distracted or absent about the solid weave of heated air that wraps around Dean’s mouth, though. Dean reaches up in a reflexive attempt to pull the gag down, and can’t get his fingers on anything. Anger and fear shoot down his spine in alternating waves of searing cold and blistering heat.

“You have ten seconds,” Sam adds, eyes still fixed on the waitress. “Ten…nine…eight…”

The waitress must see that Sam is in earnest, because she starts scrambling, clawing above her head for the top of the stools so that she can pull herself up.

“…seven…six…five…”

Sweat is rolling off the waitress as quickly as tears now, as she gets hold of one of the slick vinyl seat covers and digs her nails into it, snapping one back. Dean can smell her desperation from here—an unpleasant, astringent odor. He can’t be sure, but she might have wet herself.

And Sam’s _enjoying_ this. His pleasure is evident in the warm curl to his words and the slow, cat-like sweep of his thumb where his hand is resting on the tabletop.

“…four…three…two…”

The waitress makes a supreme effort, muscles bulging on her arms and a groan of compressed air forcing its way from her throat, and comes up to her uninjured leg just as Sam gets to, “…one.”

She stands where she is, shaking and whimpering on her right leg. Dean’s pretty sure it’s only her death grip on the stool to her left that’s keeping her upright.

“Well done, Lucy,” Sam says. “You’re halfway to keeping your skin on. Now all you have to do is come over here and take our order.”

The waitress—Lucy: a quick glance at her nametag bears out Sam’s use of her name—makes a low, hopeless moan. Her eyes actually roll back in her head as she sways from her spot between the stools. Dean tries to move toward her again and can’t push through the unseen force pinning him in place.

“I’d move now if I were you,” Sam adds. “You already wasted your countdown standing up.”

Lucy moans softly a second time, then lurches forward a pace. She screams in the brief instant her weight comes down on her bad ankle. Her body pitches to the side, almost sending her back down to the tiled floor, and she catches herself on her right foot at the last moment.

Christ, Dean can’t watch this. Sickened, he stops his useless push forward and instead twists his head away. With his eyes shut, he can’t see Lucy’s torturous progress, but then again he doesn’t have to. She’s more than loud enough for his imagination.

It isn’t until he feels the table rock against his side and hears her relieved sob that he cracks his eyes again. He finds Lucy standing at their booth, both her hands clamped so tightly on the edge of the table that her knuckles and fingers are white. Her face is pale, colorless. Her body trembles helplessly.

“See?” Sam says conversationally as he turns his attention back to Dean. “She’s stronger than you gave her credit for.”

Dean feels the power gagging his mouth and restraining his body give way and immediately uses the freedom to say, “This how you get your kicks now? Torturing innocent people?”

“It passes the time,” Sam says lightly, and then snags one of the menus tucked in the napkin holder and slides it across the table to Dean. “Here. Pick out whatever you want. I’m buying.”

Like he’s planning on whipping out a charge card to pay for this little horror show.

“I’ll pass,” Dean says, still riding the hot edge of his anger as he ignores the menu to stare Sam down. “For some reason, I’m not feeling all that hungry.”

Sam regards Dean soberly for a moment and then a slow, humorless smile spreads across his face.

“Eating isn’t optional, Dean,” he says. “It’s just a question of whether I make it a command, or if I hold you down and hand feed you myself. Or you could make the intelligent choice and behave. It’s your call.”

None of those options sound at all palatable, but only one of them is going to give Dean a chance to put his plan into action. Clenching his jaw, Dean looks down and briefly peruses the menu. It’s one unappetizing selection after the next—Dean’s stomach hasn’t ever been so rebellious at the thought of eating—so in the end, he goes with his staple reply.

“Burger and fries,” Dean says grudgingly as he pushes the menu back toward Sam with his bound hands. He won’t be able to eat any of it when it comes, but then again he isn’t planning on being here long enough to have to. If the escape attempt he’s planning doesn’t pan out, he guesses he’ll find out whether he can choke down a few bites anyway.

“Medium rare,” Sam adds, although the waitress hasn’t asked. From the glassy glaze to her eyes, Dean figures they’ll be lucky if she’s hearing any of what they’re saying. Sam doesn’t even bother looking at the menu as he tucks it back behind the napkin dispenser. He just says, “And make it two. And a couple Cokes.”

As out of it as Lucy seems to be, she still recognizes a dismissal when she hears it. Head down and eyes averted, she hobbles down the aisle back toward the dubious safety of the kitchen. Despite the pain it must be causing her, she can’t seem to get away from them fast enough.

Dean doesn’t blame her. Hell, he wishes she’d take him with her. Instead, he’s left penned in the booth with Sam, once more the center of his brother’s attention. There’s a horrible sensation swelling beneath his anger and fear. Something cold and creeping and hollow.

Fuck, Dean wants his brother back. He wants this all to be nothing more than a bad dream, or even Hell. But there’s no hint of hellfire at the edges of his vision, and the minor imperfections in the tabletop ( _slight sticky spot where someone spilled something and Lucy or whoever didn’t clean up properly_ ) are too real for him to believe he’s asleep.

Sam really did it. He killed that girl. He’s been rolling through the country on a massacre spree.

Dean’s head rings with the weight of that understanding. His vision blurs and darkens.

 _No,_ he thinks, pushing the overwhelming sensations away. _Don’t think about it now. Concentrate on getting out._

Slowly, grudgingly, his heart stops pounding away in overdrive. His vision clears and his hearing goes back to normal.

Dean swallows, trying to keep any indication of his inner turmoil from his face. He doesn’t want to give Sam the satisfaction of seeing how unnerved he is—doesn’t want to show Sam how much Sam’s unwavering stare is getting to him either. Resisting the urge to shift and glance away, he keeps his own gaze as hard and unflinching as he can make it.

Much as he tries to focus on the gold in Sam’s eyes, though, little bits of his brother’s features keep trickling in: Sam’s mouth, his broad nose, his too long hair ( _if Sam thinks Dean’s going to grow his out like that, he can forget it, resident Boy King or not_ ), the slight furrow between his eyebrows. Dean recognizes that furrow from all the times he’s ever watched Sam ferret his way through a particularly puzzling problem.

This is the first time he’s had the sharp, scuttling suspicion that Sam might rip him open to find a solution, though.

To distract himself from the sudden jolt of fear that accompanies that new concern, Dean asks, “So what’s the game plan? We ride around the country for a bit, you massacre a few billion people, and then what?”

Sam’s frown slides into a neutral expression. He lifts one hand in a beckoning motion and something invisible but very solid snags in Dean’s shirt, hauling him forward. Dean grunts as the edge of the table digs into his stomach, then gets his bound hands down on the tabletop and pushes backwards. Warm, heavy weight drops down on his back, blocking any hope of retreat before he can really start to fight, and all Dean can do as Sam reaches for him is swear and jerk his head to one side.

Sam’s fingers brush his cheek lightly before slipping along his jaw to curl around the nape of his neck. Dean’s flesh prickles at the gentle touch, which brings to mind hundreds of other caresses—Sam touching him in preludes to more intimate pettings. At the memories—or maybe just at the feel of Sam’s fingers on his skin—lines of warmth shoot from Dean’s nape down to his groin, where the heat pools and trembles in an electric, excited mass.

Alarmed and disgusted by his body’s instinctual response to Sam’s caress, Dean tosses his head. Sam’s fingers are jostled away by the violent motion, but Dean’s respite is short-lived. Almost immediately, the warm weight pressing against his back expands, surging up to clutch at his neck and lower jaw before solidifying into something that feels like an iron collar. Dean can still swallow, and he can breathe, but he might as well be welded in place for all the thrashing he can manage.

Sam’s fingers return. They leave tickling, light brushes down Dean’s cheekbone, over the bridge of his nose, against the purse of his mouth.

“ _You’re_ the game plan, Dean,” Sam purrs as the heat encasing Dean draws his head back around. “I saved you—I _bought_ you—and now I intend to keep you. If it takes salting and burning the Earth to do that, then so be it.”

Dean’s stomach lurches with a nauseating swoop at the depth of possessive madness in his brother’s voice. Sam is thinking about doing things to him—it’s evident from the hunger in his eyes and the tight, intense expression on his face. Sam is thinking about doing things to Dean right here: right on this table.

The prospect of the inevitable happening so soon—happening now—chills Dean. The thought of being forced to submit to Sam’s hands and mouth and cock terrifies him in a way that’s going to eat right through his anger and leave him a useless mess if he doesn’t do something, and before he’s really processed the intent, Dean has opened his mouth and bluffed, “You try and put me on my back and I’ll fight you.”

The slow, warm smile that spreads over Sam’s lips in return is so far from reassuring it isn’t funny. “I suppose you would. But do you really think you’d be able to stop me?”

A warm, weak tremble passes through Dean’s body. He doesn’t even have to consider Sam’s question to know that the answer is ‘no’. After all of the power Sam has been tossing around, Dean doesn’t think he’d even be able to make it difficult for Sam to get his clothes off.

If Sam wants him—and Sam does; he’s made that crystal clear—then he can take him, no sweat. The only thing that can stop Sam is Sam himself, and Dean hasn’t seen any indications that Sam would balk at the prospect of a little rape. Not so long as he enjoys himself.

It isn’t a question of ‘if’ Sam is going to rape him. It’s just a matter of ‘where’ and ‘when’. And, from Sam’s unrelenting caresses of Dean’s face and the unfocused warmth in his eyes, ‘when’ is looking more and more like ‘now’.

 _I won’t beg,_ Dean tells himself as he clenches his jaw. _He doesn’t get anything out of me. Not a goddamned peep._

He’s determined to keep that promise to himself even if Sam rips him up inside. He’ll bite through his own lip to keep it, if it means offering less of a show to Yellow Eyes where it’s watching from its place by the door. Hell, he’ll swallow his own tongue if it means he can keep even a modicum of dignity as the waitress and the cook listen in on his defilement from the kitchen. They’ll be able to hear the slap of Sam’s body against his, and probably a couple of grunts Dean won’t be able to keep down, but that’s little enough to maintain the illusion of privacy, at least.

But instead of hauling Dean the rest of the way onto the table, Sam releases him. Dean, who hasn’t stopped fighting Sam’s power for a second, immediately slams back against his side of the booth hard enough to drive a grunt from his lungs.

Sam’s smile widens into something like a grin as Dean watches him warily. “What? You didn’t think I had any self-control?”

Dean hardly believes that he gets to go a little longer without finding out how sex with Sam would feel when he’s unwilling. It takes several tries to point out, “You were pretty touchy-feely in that motel room.”

Sam’s brow furrows in confusion, and Dean can practically see him rewinding back through their time together. Then comprehension hits, strongly enough that Dean can almost see what it must have looked like through Sam’s eyes—Dean chained to the bed, surrounded by a ring of demons that Sam was popping one by one beneath the sheer pressure of his power. In the wake of his understanding, Sam’s face twitches into a mask of contrite apology.

“I’m sorry about that,” he says. “It took me some time to… adjust. But that’s over now. I can wait.”

“Wait for what, exactly?” Dean asks—not so much because he’s eager to know what Sam is planning, but because it’ll be nice to have enough warning to prepare himself when Sam finally snaps and decides that ‘no means no’ doesn’t apply anymore.

“For you to stop pretending you don’t still want me.”

It’s a ludicrous enough concept that Dean laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “Good luck with that.”

“I mean it, Dean,” Sam replies, speaking in such an earnest tone that Dean, despite his better instincts, almost believes his brother. “I know you still love me. It’s just… This is a shock for you. And I get that you need time to adjust. I do. But sooner or later, you’re going to see that this is all for the best, and you’ll remember that you’re mine—that you’ve always _been_ mine.”

“How long’ve you been snorting those Fruit Loops, dude?”

Sam’s answering smile is edged and sharp. He leans forward over the table, catching Dean’s bound hands with his right. When Dean tries to jerk away, Sam somehow manages to tighten his grip in implacable warning while running the tips of his fingers along the insides of both of Dean’s wrists.

“Say what you want, Dean, but you know it as well as I do.”

Sam’s voice is a low, intimate rumble that makes Dean—muscles taut and vibrating with the need to get Sam off of him—shiver. His smile doesn’t so much widen as deepen into a feral, Cheshire cat grin.

Feigning way more confidence than he feels, Dean replies, “I know if you don’t get your hand off me now, you’re gonna draw back a stump.”

Sam chuckles as he forces his fingers more firmly between Dean’s wrists, nails catching on Dean’s pulse and igniting heat beneath his skin. His stomach twists simultaneously: revulsion warring with arousal and throwing him even more off balance than he already was.

“You knew it when you first spread those gorgeous legs for me, didn’t you?” Sam adds on an insinuating purr, and Dean jumps as he feels a hand slide up the inside of his right thigh. When he jerks his head down, though, staring between his legs with wide, startled eyes, he can’t see anything. The invisible hand moves again, stroking, and Dean swears as he squirms, pressing his thighs together in an attempt to force the intrusive touch out.

“Mmm,” Sam says from the other side of the table. “Flustered is a damn pretty look on you.”

“Get off me,” Dean growls through his teeth, biting the words like he can chew through the wrist of Sam’s groping, invisible hand if he tries hard enough. He jerks again, harder, as the hand slides northward in a sudden movement. His lungs close up on him in choking panic as he realizes he can’t fight back against this enemy. He’s helpless. He’s fucking _helpless_.

That invisible, groping touch lingers several seconds longer—long enough to prove to Dean that Sam doesn’t have to ease off, that he’s doing it of his own free will—and then vanishes. Dean’s breath comes whistling back into his lungs on a deep exhale, and this time when he yanks his hands back, they slip from Sam’s grip. Dean’s appalled to realize that he’s shaking all over like a well-worked horse.

And Sam. Sam is _smirking_ at him.

There aren’t words enough for the terrified rage that shudders through Dean. Or rather, there are words, but there are way too many fighting to tear themselves from his throat at once to fit. His throat aches, hot and swollen with vindictive venom, and he knows it’s boiling in his eyes too—he knows Sam can see it.

Sam’s heightened amusement is like acid thrown into an open wound.

Sobbing whimpers intrude on Dean’s fury only gradually, and the waitress is almost at their table when he finally realizes that she’s approaching. He moderates his expression—not for Sam or himself, but for her; because she doesn’t need to be more frightened than she already is. If Dean can stay strong for her, if he can look more in control of this situation than he is, maybe she’ll take a little heart from it.

Lucy is moving in a slow, lurching gait. She has a Styrofoam cup in each hand, both firmly lidded to keep their contents inside as she walks. Smart move, considering how volatile Sam is. God only knows what he would have done to her if she’d spilled their drinks on the way over.

Dean drops his gaze from Lucy’s puffy, tear-streaked face to check on her ankle and sees that it’s already swollen to the size of a grapefruit. He’s going to have to carry her when they make a run for it, or they aren’t getting anywhere.

“Thanks,” Sam says when Lucy puts down the cups—just like he always has, like nothing out of the ordinary is going on here. Dean resists the insane urge to laugh. He’s too aware of the fact that he’s starting to sound unhinged. Like he’s cracking up under the pressure.

 _Keep it together, Winchester,_ he tells himself, and carefully doesn’t look at Lucy as she limps hastily away again.

“Have a drink,” Sam says, reaching across the table to slide a straw into Dean’s soda.

Dean looks briefly down at the white Styrofoam cup with its white straw and then holds up his bound hands.

Sam, sipping on his own soda, lifts a single eyebrow and then sets his cup down to observe, “You don’t need your hands to drink.”

“No,” Dean retorts, “but it’s gonna be a little tough to pick up my burger like this. Besides, I have to take a leak. Or were you planning on making me piss myself like Yellow Eyes did?”

Sam’s eyes narrow minutely before flicking up, focusing past Dean toward the doorway. His nostrils flare and his lips thin into a tight, white line. Suddenly, Dean feels uncomfortably hot. Sweat beads along his hairline and rolls down the back of his neck. When he chances a quick glance at the window to his right, a rapid line of fog is eating its way across the glass.

Yeah, Dean didn’t think Sam knew about that bit of casual humiliation. What he wasn’t sure of was whether Sam would give a shit, although the answer seems to be yes.

More evidence that Sam is still in there: that he can be saved.

Still staring at the yellow-eyed demon lingering in the doorway, Sam gestures negligently toward Dean’s bound hands. The rope around his wrists slithers to life, unknotting and then slipping down to lie on the table like discarded snakeskin. Dean takes a moment to rub at his wrists, working at the reddened, chafed skin with his thumbs and forefingers.

“Go ahead, baby,” Sam says in a distracted, off-handed tone. “I want to have a quick talk with Azazel.”

Dean’s skin lights with an embarrassed, infuriated flush at the endearment—that’s between him and Sammy, it’s private, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to hear it when he’s so pissed and torn up inside. A bitter retort swells in his throat, rising up into his mouth, and he clamps his jaw shut on it at the last moment. He’s getting what he wants, after all. There’s no point in risking changing Sam’s mind by mouthing off.

Dean slides along the seat and then gets to his feet, careful to keep his eyes fixed on his destination. He walks slowly and steadily toward the hallway, fighting the near-deafening scream of instinct telling him to drop the casual air and run, run, _run_. The back of his neck prickles: a sensation not helped at all by the silence looming behind him. He’d feel better if he could hear Sam or the demon: if he could be sure they aren’t both staring at his back as he makes his way toward ( _freedom_ ) the hall.

Fuck, he’s positive that Sam is going to call him back at any moment. He’s certain that, somehow, Sam knows what he’s planning—Sam has always known, and this is nothing more than a cruel ruse. Sam is just playing with him, batting him back and forth like a cat amusing itself with a broken-winged sparrow. Letting the sparrow think it has a chance at escape… watching it hop away… and then dropping a heavy paw across its back and pinning it to the earth.

But Sam doesn’t call after him. Sam’s power doesn’t snarl at his feet or grip his arms.

Unhindered, Dean steps from the main part of the diner into the shaded hallway ( _crowded bulletin board of local announcements to his left_ ) and lets out a shaky breath of relief. He doesn’t speed his pace until after he’s gone several steps further, though—not until he’s certain he’s out of view. Then, casting a glance over his shoulder to make sure the hallway is clear behind him, he shifts into a light jog.

There are four doors in the hallway: the two restrooms on the right ( _‘Gals’ and ‘Gents’ painted in black on the wood_ ); the exit at the far end, which must open out onto some sort of parking lot; and an unmarked door several yards past the bulletin board to the left. Dean aims straight for this last door, coming to a breathless stop before it and pushing it open. He winces at the slight creaking noise the hinges give off and makes himself finish off the movement with a steady, easier application of pressure.

Just like he hoped, the door reveals a short hall lined on one side by sink, drying rack and automatic dishwasher, and on the other by blank tile. The far end of the hall opens onto a gleam of metal and the sizzling scent of meat—the kitchen.

Dean can’t see either of Sam’s hostages from his place by the door, so he lets himself into the hall and eases forward. Mindful of the window opening onto the rest of the diner, he hunches low—Sam’s attention will likely be absorbed by Yellow Eyes, but there’s no point in risking an accidental sighting. He can hear the burgers frying as he passes the sink, and the low murmur of voices coming from the main part of the diner: Sam having his ‘talk’. Three more steps and he can see Lucy leaning against the counter with tears running down her face.

“Psst,” he hisses, trying to get her attention. “Hey. Hey, lady. Lucy.”

It’s the cook who hears him first, though—the cook who steps sharply into view and turns in Dean’s direction with a cleaver clutched in one hand and an alarmed, terror-struck expression. Lucy looks over at the cook’s movement, spots Dean, and stares.

“Come on,” Dean whispers, waving urgently at both of them. “We need to get out of here.”

But for some reason, Lucy has gone slack-jawed and passive. When the cook takes a step forward, his expression is vague and unfocused. His hand is loose around the cleaver.

“So bright,” he murmurs, his eyes fixed on Dean. “Pretty.”

Dean’s insides shift awkwardly as he frowns—he’s heard that before, and the words are setting off echoes that Lucy’s strange behavior earlier ( _and the demons, what the fuck were they after?_ ) didn’t rouse. Memories twitch to the front of his mind: Sam taking him out to dinner, Sam pulling that PDA crap, people looking at them. Looking at Dean. And then again in the bar, Dean was drawing more than his fair share of attention. Hell, Bozo tried to touch him, and he called Dean—what was it? A bright, shiny thing? Staring at Dean like Dean was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. Like a moth drawn in by a flame.

 _Sam did something to me_ , Dean realizes with a cold rush, and then denies the idea a moment later. He’d remember if that were true, wouldn’t he? He would have noticed something going on.

Unless Sam did something to Dean while Dean was sleeping.

The thought steals Dean’s breath. His feelings of betrayal deepen, this time joined with a dirty, sickening sensation of violation. The thought of Sam moving around him in the dark—whispering words over Dean’s slumbering body, tracing symbols on his chest or face or stomach with his fingers—isn’t just chilling but repugnant.

 _Why?_ he demands of himself. _Why the hell would he have turned me into a goddamned Lite Brite?_ He doesn’t expect to find an answer for the question, so the thought, when it comes on the heels of his demand, takes him by surprise.

The ritual in the cemetery. Sam took Dean’s blood to complete it. He must have… he must have begun the night before: must have needed to prime Dean’s blood or something.

Looks like whatever he did is having an unintentional and really fucking frustrating side effect—and one that has worsened since the ritual took hold and brought Yellow Eyes back. Those people at the restaurant and bar were weirdly fascinated by Dean, but they were still coherent. Lucy and the Iron Chef over there don’t look like they have more room in their brains than the chef’s continued muttering of ‘bright’ and ‘pretty’.

How the fuck is Dean supposed to get these people out of here if they can’t function when they look at him?

Dean hesitates, indecisive, and then moves toward Lucy.

Fuck it. He’ll carry them both out if he has to.

The chef makes a low, whining noise of loss as Dean moves away from him, and Dean looks toward him with a finger pressed over his lips to signal silence. It’s probably a futile gesture, but it’s instinct to warn. Sure enough, the chef shifts agitatedly from foot to foot. He seems to have forgotten how to walk, although he’s reaching for Dean in clear enough demand.

Dean’ll be lucky if the dude doesn’t scream the diner down when he starts lugging Lucy for the door.

Moving more hastily than before, Dean turns back to Lucy and reaches out toward her. Lucy groans low in her throat—an entranced, longing noise—and extends her arm in return. Dean’s fingertips brush her hand, then slip further to close around her wrist—

—and Lucy is jerked unceremoniously out of range.

Dean flinches as she slams headfirst into the far wall with a sick, cracking noise. Her body is limp as it falls back to the floor—dead weight and there’s no pretending otherwise. Not with that round, reddened indent of crushed tile where she hit.

A second crash to Dean’s right reminds him of the cook, who has collapsed back against the grill. The sizzle of burgers has been joined by the sizzle of human flesh ( _smells like chicken, smells like_ ) but that isn’t as disturbing as the sight of the cook chopping repeatedly into his own neck with the cleaver in his right hand.

Jesus Christ.

Adrenaline seizes Dean by the scruff of the neck and sends him bolting back down the short hall. His eyes are locked on the door into the hallway, he’s willing himself through it. He can see himself running through it, just as clearly as he can see Lucy flying backwards over and over. Just as clearly as he can hear the sizzle of cooking meat; the brief spat of blood hitting the hot grill as well as the cook continues to chop.

He’s gone less than five feet before something hooks into the back of his shirt, jerking him off his feet and carrying him backwards, first through the kitchen and then out through the order window. Dean tries to catch hold of the ledge as he slides over it, but it’s gone before he can get any purchase and then he’s crashing into the front counter, knocking the register off and down onto the floor with a tremendous crash.

Only then does the hook release him, delivering him back under his own power once more. Dean’s shoulder and elbow and hip are pounding from his collision with the register, but he ignores the pain as he flails to right himself and get a look at more of his immediate surroundings than just the ceiling.

Sam is there before he can even finish sitting up. Sam’s hand closes over Dean’s throat and shoves him back down. He isn’t gripping hard enough to interfere with Dean’s breathing, but Dean’s having trouble with that anyway as he brings his own hands up to clutch at Sam’s forearm and wrist.

It’s been seconds at most, and Dean’s mind is still grappling to keep up with what just happened. How fucking fast his escape attempt went south.

“Dean,” Sam says in a disappointed, chiding voice. “Dean, Dean, Dean. I really did think you knew better than this.”

“Get off me!” Dean spits as he finds his voice again. Tightening his grip, he tries to jerk Sam’s hand free.

“Where did you think you were going to go?” Sam continues, ignoring Dean’s protest. “Even if you’d gotten past the demon stationed at the rear exit—and yes, I do have one there—what did you think would happen then? You’d run off in the woods? Find a car to hotwire?”

Dean wasn’t actually thinking that far ahead. He’s never been one for planning things out in advance. That was always Dad’s bag. And Sam’s.

Maybe if Dean could have managed a little more foresight, they wouldn’t be here right now.

“You think it’s safe out there for you on your own?” Sam adds in a darker tone, and the words remind Dean of the demons in the parking lot—of their mindless determination to get to him, and Sam sending the lot up in flames.

The memory is a goading reminder of his recent realization and he spits, “You son of a bitch! What the fuck did you do to me?”

“I saved you,” Sam answers flatly. Like it’s an answer.

Like it’s the only answer.

“You turned me into a walking glow stick!” Dean yells. In the extremity of his terror and rage, he manages to rear up almost six inches before Sam pushes him back down.

“I took your soul back from Hell,” Sam corrects. “It isn’t my fault you’re so bright. But I have a way to fix that, I think. We just need to get to Columbus. And you…” His tone and eyes darken with warning. “You need to learn to behave.”

Yeah, that’s going to happen just about never.

Dean shows Sam his teeth in something he knows looks nothing like a smile. “Go screw yourself, you goddamned murderer.”

He spots the darkness coming from the sharpening intent in Sam’s eyes an entire second before it carries him away.


	3. Chapter 3

Columbus sucks, or maybe that’s just the company.

The streets are still smoking when they drive in, although Dean sees no sign of any fire or demons. Come to think of it, he hasn’t seen anyone but Sam for the past three days, most of them spent driving down back roads with his hands bound to the door handle.

Seven times, Sam has stopped to pick up food, leaving Dean tethered in the car each time like a damn dog. Not that Dean wanted to go into any of those diners—not when he could tell from the passenger seat of the Impala that any people unlucky enough to have picked this place to stop had already been taken care of. The windows were inevitably coated with dark, scarlet stains—other things too; thicker gobs that Dean didn’t want to examine too closely. Sam cheerfully walked into those slaughterhouses on his own, giving Dean a few hasty minutes to jerk against the ropes restraining him, and then came back out with a whistle on his lips and a paper bag clutched in one hand.

The first time they stopped, he tried to make Dean eat in the diner parking lot. When Dean protested, Sam was as good as his word, loosening Dean’s wrists from the door and making it an order. Dean was forced to devour the burger, a large side of fries, a chocolate shake, and a slice of still warm apple pie while Sam’s hand stroked idly through his hair.

As soon as Sam’s controlling power released him, of course, he shoved the passenger door open and puked it all back up again. He tried to run, too. Got as many as three staggered steps—probably because Sam was too shocked by the sudden turn of events to react—before a heavy, burning weight drove him to his knees. Then he got to kneel in the parking lot, shaking and sweating, while Sam went back into the diner and came back out with a plastic bottle of water for him to wash his mouth out with.

Apparently Dean puking his guts out was enough to prove to Sam that entrails slowly sliding down blood-smeared windows don’t make for good dinner scenery, though, because that was the only time Sam made him try it. After that, they shifted locations—twice, when Sam was feeling generous, Dean was even allowed one hand free so he could feed himself instead of being forced to swallow whatever Sam put in his mouth.

There were bathroom breaks, too, where they pulled over and Sam came into the bathroom with him. Dean was allowed both hands free in the stall, but he wasn’t allowed to close the door ( _what the fuck did Sam think he was going to do, build a grenade launcher out of the toilet tissue dispenser?_ ), which was pretty fucking embarrassing. Good thing Dean doesn’t have public performance issues, or he’d be in serious pain right about now.

Sam hasn’t touched him more than casually since that forced meal outside the diner, but Dean knows he wants to. Sam has told him as much, and he hasn’t made any efforts to curb his wandering eyes. Now that they’re in Columbus, though, Dean’s nauseous stomach and jittery insides tell him that things are going to change.

Three days isn’t all that long, but it’s been more than long enough to prove to Dean that this new version of his brother has no trouble taking what he wants. Any day now, Sam’s need for instant gratification is going to overpower the better intentions he keeps swearing he has.

Dean isn’t sure his mind is going to survive being held down and fucked by the thing in the driver’s seat. He’s already noticed the world taking on a distinctly surreal tilt as he tries to process the nightmare of his surroundings. He dreams, when Sam knocks him out after yet another unsuccessful escape attempt, and his dreams are covered in blood. Sometimes, he’s not sure whether he’s woken up or not.

 _Christ, I need a shower_ , he thinks now, leaning his forehead wearily against the window. He hasn’t gone this long without bathing since he broke his damn leg in the middle of the woods as a kid, and he doesn’t remember appreciating that experience much either.

If Sam does plan on screwing him six ways from Sunday once they hole up in a motel, Dean hopes his brother will at least let him wash the funk off first.

Instead of a motel, though, they pull up in front of what looks like an old warehouse. There’s nothing written on the exterior of the building—there isn’t even a helpful logo of some sort that Dean can use to make an educated guess.

“Where are we?” he asks, sure Sam is going to continue to give the mysterious and cryptic answer of ‘Columbus,’ just like he has whenever Dean’s asked where the hell they’re going.

Instead, Sam says, “Red Moon Smith.”

Great. An actual answer.

Encouraged, Dean follows up with, “And we’re here because…”

But Sam just smiles, looking over with inscrutable eyes the rich color of honey. He stares at Dean long enough that Dean is itching with the need to look away ( _fuck that, he’s not giving Sam the satisfaction_ ) and then, finally, he gets out of the car and walks around the hood toward Dean’s door.

Suddenly, sitting here tied to the inside of the car door seems preferable to the alternative.

Dean fights to keep the door shut when Sam goes to open it, but there isn’t any noticeable hesitation in the way the door pulls out, drawing Dean along with it. He hasn’t had an issue remaining upright before, but he’s off balance from resisting, and this time he spills out after it himself. Sam quickly leans around the door and catches him with one hand, holding him steady until Dean has recovered himself enough to elbow Sam’s help away and keep himself more or less in the car. Even if having to sit twisted around in the seat with his arms fully extended in front of him isn’t the most comfortable of positions.

“You’re not going to try running again, are you?” Sam asks as he works loose the knot binding Dean’s hands to the door.

“You think I’d get anywhere if I did?” Dean replies dully—he’s made four attempts to run after that try outside the second diner, each of them even less successful than the one before.

“It isn’t about what I think. It’s about you believing that running isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

That simple statement, coupled with Sam’s patient tone, makes Dean want to bolt right now. He wants to run just for the sake of trying—just to prove to Sam that he isn’t whipped and isn’t ever going to be. But he has to admit that there’s something to be said for getting Sam to lower his guard. Dean may not be used to playing a long con, but Dad made sure he knew how and Dean hasn’t ever had quite this much incentive to get it right.

So he holds still while Sam frees the rope from the door. He doesn’t stir when Sam pulls the rope away from his wrists completely. He lets his brother run assessing fingers over the chafed, raw skin where Dean has been pulling desperately against his bonds whenever he thinks he can get away with it.

“You need to stop hurting yourself,” Sam says with a frown.

Good behavior or not, Dean can’t help but laugh at that. “Yeah, man. Thanks. I’ll get right on it.”

Dean’s sarcasm gets him a reproving glance, but Sam doesn’t say anything as he reties the rope around first one wrist and then the other. Sam pauses then, waiting for Dean to put his hands into position for the final knots, and Dean actually considers it. It’d go a long way toward selling the pussy whipped character he’s decided to try playing.

In the end, though, he just can’t bring himself to participate in restraining himself. Sam can go fuck himself if he actually thinks Dean would roll over this easily.

After a pause, Sam says, “Hands together.”

Dean’s deliberately slow in obeying, and Sam is a little rougher than Dean guesses he might otherwise have been in response. He winces as the rope chafes against his damaged skin, but Sam’s fingers don’t slow, and within moments his hands are securely bound to each other.

Sam uses Dean’s bound hands to haul him to his feet, and Dean thinks passive thoughts as he comes unprotestingly. He allows Sam to keep a steadying hand on his shoulder as Sam guides him over to a small door set in the side of the warehouse.

“Go ahead and knock,” Sam orders when they draw to a stop outside, and Dean does that too, glancing around in obvious appraisal of the environs.

It looks like the demons and the fire more or less avoided this part of the city, but then again there probably wasn’t much for them here. The whole block looks like someone forgot to post zoning signs turning the place into the town dump.

“You take me to the nicest places,” he says, giving Sam a flat, insincere smile.

From the furrow that forms between Sam’s eyebrows, Sam isn’t too amused by Dean’s pointed joke, but his attention is quickly caught by something on the other side of the warehouse door and he doesn’t respond. When Dean turns his own attention that way, he can hear someone shuffling closer, then the shriek of metal on metal and the hollow clanking of locks being undone, and a moment later the door swings open.

He shrinks back from the twisted face hovering in the darkness on the other side, trying to grope with bound hands for a weapon he doesn’t have. Sam’s hand tightens in a restrictive clamp on him before he can do more than scuff the ground beneath his feet. Dean makes another instinctive, horrified noise deep in his throat, jerking against his brother’s hold.

“Yeah, I ain’t too pretty, am I?” an amused, leathery voice asks.

It’s the amusement in the voice more than anything else that cuts through Dean’s adrenaline-fueled response. He catches hold of himself, taking a closer look at what he first took for some new, deformed kind of demon, and realizes that the face in the darkness belongs to nothing more terrifying than an old man.

The man in the doorway is whipcord thin, with sinewy, rope-like muscles stretched over his bared arms. His face is horribly scarred—the left half seeming melted like candle tallow; the right pocked and pitted with moon craters. His left eye socket gapes emptily, offering an unsettling view into his head. His right is filled with a milk, blind orb that isn’t quite identical to those demons who ringed Dean’s bed: Dean can, now that he’s actively looking, spot the blurry, vague outline of pupil and iris below the white film.

Those are old wounds, none of Sam’s doing, but Dean feels a latent flush of guilt anyway. Looking at the evidence of this old man’s suffering somehow brings home what Sam has been doing—flitting here, there, everywhere through the country and leaving destruction and death in his wake. And Dean has been keeping himself as focused as possible on how pissed he is at Sam for doing this, but deep down he knows that it isn’t really Sam’s fault.

Because Sam is Dean’s responsibility, isn’t he? Dean bought his life at that crossroads last year. Whatever Sam does now—however much suffering he causes—it’s Dean’s to own. Sam’s deliberate destruction of himself is Dean’s to own.

The wave of guilt and grief that threatens is overwhelming. The pressure thrusts against the bulwarks of Dean’s mind and his defenses buckle—might be a mercy if they succumb, because as bad as the throbbing ache in his chest is, it’ll be better than existing in this too stark, too rational nightmare by Sam’s side.

Except that if Dean folds here and lets the guilt sweep him away, he really will be defenseless. He’ll be completely at the mercy of this cruel, demon-bred thing wearing Sam’s body and using his voice. He won’t be able to protect himself. He won’t be able to try to protect the innocent civilians Sam seems intent on ripping to shreds.

Worse, he won’t be able to protect Sam. And yeah, “protecting Sam” has a different definition lately—a definition that includes slipping Sam’s grip, and hunting down a cure like Sam’s nothing more than another, particularly stressful case, and maybe hurting him a bit to heal him—but it’s still Dean’s job. He has a duty—to the world, to Dad, to himself, but most of all to Sam—to stop his brother.

Dean struggles with the balance of emotions in his chest and somehow his desperation is just enough to tip the scales back into righteous, bitter anger. He won’t be able to keep this up forever, though, and he knows it now. He can feel the clock ticking ever faster, counting down to a time when escape won’t be anything but a helpless man’s useless daydream.

“You’ll have to excuse Dean,” Sam says smoothly. “He’s been having a rough couple of weeks.”

The old man’s blind face tilts in Sam’s direction. His mouth twists up in a smile. “Sam Winchester, isn’t it? You sound taller in person.” He laughs jovially at his own joke, and with none of the bitterness Dean was expecting.

Unsurprisingly, the evidence that there’s a pretty decent guy beneath the scars does nothing to relieve the tension in Dean’s gut. He wants to shout a warning—to tell the geezer that the man he’s chatting so easily with has gold eyes, and is infected with some sort of rabid, maddening power—but Sam’s hand tightens on him. When Dean glances over reflexively, Sam’s expression is both warning and promise of immediate violence.

Dean swallows and keeps his mouth shut.

“I get that a lot,” Sam says after a pause that isn’t quite long enough for the old man’s smile to falter.

“This your partner with you?” the old man asks, face swinging back in Dean’s direction. Something about the way he says it makes Dean think that it isn’t their hunting relationship Sam has told him about, and he flushes with hot, angry embarrassment.

Sam had no right—no fucking right—to tell anyone about them. It isn’t anyone else’s business.

“Yes,” Sam agrees. “This is Dean.”

A tendril of something coils over the nape of Dean’s neck in a caress and he rolls his shoulders as best as he’s able in an attempt to dislodge it. Sam maintains the tendril long enough to remind Dean that he has no say in whether he’s touched and then allows it to dissipate again.

“Well, pleased to meet you both in person,” the man says as he backs up out of the doorway. “Come on inside—there’s a light switch to the right of the door. I can’t remember if I turned it on this morning.”

He didn’t, which is part of the reason Dean was so startled by his appearance. That face would be hideous even in bright sunlight. Seen looming forward out of pitch blackness, though, its initial impression on him was Lovecraftian.

As Dean steps forward over the threshold under the cautionary pressure of Sam’s hand on his arm, he notices that the interior of the warehouse isn’t completely dark. There’s a glow deep inside, dim and banked and leaving him with the impression of something bulky and square-edged seated in a wide, open area. The very air feels expansive as he stands in the wan light filtering in from outside; there’s more movement to it than there would be in a smaller space. Breathing in, Dean smells charcoal and warm metal, and as the overhead lights spring on with a weak hum of electricity, he sees why.

‘Smith’ isn’t the guy’s name: it’s his occupation.

The interior of the warehouse is mostly bare, with bars of metal piled in bins near the thick iron support beams. A couple of worktables have been set out—one clean and bare, the other cluttered with a collection of etching tools, small hammers and thin scraps of metal. In one corner of the warehouse, there’s a counter with a cash register and, hung up on the wall behind it, something that looks like the mailbox cubbies Dean recognizes from a job he and Dad worked at a rundown hotel that used to cater to the stars and starlets of the 40s—including one very determined ( _and very dead_ ) ingénue. These pigeonholes are larger than the ones he saw there, though—probably because they’re meant to store completed metal works rather than mail.

The forge is what really dominates the room, though; its chimney built into the back wall and its bellows immense. Bins of coal stand to one side, cords of wood to the other. Two antique-looking barrels, which Dean assumes are filled with water. Anvils of varying sizes. An iron stand covered by a bewildering array of tools. A scarred leather apron hung up on a metal coat rack.

The blind man—old Red Moon himself, most likely—is already halfway toward the counter. Dean resists Sam’s gentle nudge to follow and instead twists around to get a better look at his brother’s face.

“What are we doing here?” he asks, keeping his voice as low as he dares—in his experience, blind people have ears like bats, and he doesn’t want to be overheard. Not as long as Sam seems content to pass himself off as just another guy.

Although the sunken, uneasy quiver in Dean’s stomach tells him that the wolf in Sam isn’t going to be content to play the lamb for long.

“Fixing your problem,” Sam answers just as softly. “Unless you’d rather have me continue to kill anything that looks at you.”

A shiver of horror and revulsion ripple through him, strong enough that he physically shudders beneath Sam’s hand. In the wake of that shiver, he feels something else—something low and creeping that he quickly recognizes as guilt. Yup, looks like he was right about not being able to keep that one in the box anymore.

Sam’s expression warms into smug satisfaction and he slides his hand up from Dean’s arm to cup the back of his head.

“So,” he adds, “best behavior while I finish our transaction.”

Dean’s first instinct is to tell Sam where he can shove his ‘best behavior’, and then yell for Red Moon to run, and run fast—he’s blind, sure, but he’d at least have a _chance_. He has to wrestle with himself as he weighs the possibility of Sam killing Red Moon when he’s done with him against the certainty of Sam killing him after Dean shouts his warning. It’s a surprisingly difficult decision to make all the same, and Dean’s insides seethe as he shuts his mouth and firms his jaw.

“That’s it,” Sam murmurs, giving the back of Dean’s head an approving caress, and Dean nearly loses his cool right there. He does whip his head to the side, dislodging Sam’s hand. Before Sam can reclaim him, he strides forward on his own, aiming himself for the counter where Red Moon is feeling along the front of the cubbies. Sam catches up to him before he’s gone more than a few paces, of course, but the sensation of fingers closing around his bicep—like being manacled—can’t drown out the tiny flare of victory Dean feels at his small act of defiance.

The register set-up on the counter turns out to be a little more unique than Dean thought from further away. As he reaches the counter, he sees that all of the keys are covered with Braille decals ( _presumably corresponding to the numbers and symbols beneath_ ). There’s also a secondary printer hooked up to the side of the machine, which likely creates a Braille version of receipts for Red Moon’s personal records.

“So,” Dean says as Red Moon finally reaches into one of the cubbies. “A blind smith, huh? How does that happen?”

Sam’s hand, which tightened on Dean when he opened his mouth, eases again.

“You do what you’re good at, I guess,” Red Moon replies, turning around and setting a cloth-wrapped bundle on the counter. “Takes me a bit longer than most, but those that value quality over expediency don’t seem to mind much. Haven’t had any complaints, anyways.”

When he folds back the cloth wrapping Sam’s order, Dean can see why.

The bracelets—wrist cuffs, really, with a slight gap in the metal for a hand to slide into place—gleam warmly in the light. They’re a rich color—not pure gold, but something deeper: heavier. The outsides of the cuffs are flawlessly smooth, but the insides are covered with a strange script that makes Dean uneasy. He recognizes magic when he sees it, and those runes stink of something old and powerful.

“Took a bit to get the etchings right,” Red Moon comments, running one finger over them before sliding the cuffs over the counter in Dean’s direction. “But I think I’ve got them down.”

“Beautiful,” Sam murmurs, releasing Dean’s arm to reach out and run his fingers over the metal. Then, with a sideways glance at Dean, he adds, “Just what you wanted, aren’t they, baby?”

Fire coils in Dean’s stomach—there’s that word again, uttered like a dare, like Sam is trying to make Dean lose his temper—but he swallows it down and keeps his voice more or less even as he says, “Yeah, they’re swell.”

“I take it you’re satisfied with the work, then?” Red Moon checks.

“Oh, yes,” Sam agrees. His voice has slipped into a silky, rich tone with which Dean is starting to become uncomfortably familiar. “We’re very satisfied, thank you.”

Red Moon’s ruined face quirks in a smile and he reaches for the register. Dean’s stomach plummets through the floor as Sam catches the man’s wrist before he can quite touch the keys.

“Unfortunately,” Sam says, “I need a little something else from you.”

“No!” Dean barks, reaching up and grabbing the collar of Sam’s shirt with his bound hands. “Sam, you don’t need to do this. Just—just take the fucking cuffs and let’s go.”

 _I behaved,_ he thinks but doesn’t say. _I’m being good, so don’t you pull this fucking crap._

But Dean doesn’t get so much as a glance.

Red Moon gasps as Sam’s grip tightens, fingers digging into the man’s flesh. “What—let go; you’re hurting me.”

“It’s nothing personal,” Sam says, only it looks a lot personal to Dean. The way Sam jerks Red Moon forward and slits his throat with a knife he seemed to pull out of thin air looks nothing _but_ personal.

Dean jerks back, dropping his brother’s shirt, but he can’t avoid catching some of the initial jolt of arterial spray. Still, most of the blood rains down on the cuffs, which immediately start to steam and hiss. The sound mingles with Red Moon’s startled, desperate gurgles in a noxious, sinister way.

This is way beyond Dean’s pay grade.

All his earlier thoughts of lulling Sam into a false sense of security vanish and he breaks away, sprinting for the warehouse door. This time, there’s no hook of power in his shirt or tangle around his ankles. Instead, the rope binding his hands comes to life and jerks him firmly off course. Dean stumbles along with the pull for the first few steps in order to keep from falling on his face and being dragged, and then digs his heels in and starts trying to yank his wrists free.

“No,” he mutters, dimly aware that he has broken out in a cold sweat. “ _No_ , Goddamn it!”

His boots skid over the thin layer of sand ( _fire precaution, likely_ ) covering the warehouse floor as he’s dragged inexorably toward the uncluttered worktable. The rope writhes around his hands as it pulls him, unraveling slightly to form new knots more conducive to hauling him directly where he doesn’t want to go. Miraculously, the coils around his left wrist actually loosen and between one tug and the next, his left hand is free.

Triumph heats Dean’s chest, but as he readies himself to repeat the move with his right hand, the rope constricts forebodingly. Dean could yank on the damn thing all night and he wouldn’t end up with anything more productive than a dislocated wrist.

“Shit,” he swears, and reaches forward to pick at the new knots with his freed left hand. As he digs at the rope with his nails and fingertips, the rope slithers even tighter, chafing against already sore flesh—and, from the wet, sharp sting, breaking the skin in places.

“Stop fighting, Dean,” Sam calls from behind him. “You’re only hurting yourself.”

“Fuck you!” Dean yells back, then has to shut up and pour all of his focus into keeping himself from being pulled the last few feet up to the worktable’s edge. The table is higher than he expected, coming up about mid-sternum on his body. Its surface is pitted with grooves and charred in places—traces of Red Moon’s efforts.

It’s more information than Dean wants to have.

Baring his teeth, he readies himself for a supreme wrench backwards, and then grunts as the rope shoots down and forward with an unexpectedly strong jerk. Dean is drawn along in the wake of his wrist, upper body slamming down with numbing force against the wooden tabletop. His right shoulder twists as the rope draws his hand to the opposite edge, forcing the entire right side of his body into a taut, straining line.

Dean tries pulling back and can’t budge. The table’s too high off the floor for him to get some slack by clambering on top of it, and he doesn’t have that sort of leverage in this position anyway. Gripping the side of the table with his left hand, he tries to find some advantage by adding some push to his pull.

At the sound of Sam’s approaching footsteps behind him, the flood of adrenaline feeding Dean’s escape attempts increases. Shaking, he gathers himself, concentrates on giving this next wrench everything he’s got, and then throws himself backwards with a roar of effort.

And immediately goes limp against the wood as he feels something give in his shoulder.

“Motherfucker!” he screams, losing his grip on the table. His right shoulder throbs, a hot ball of agony—dislocated, fuck.

Dean is too lost in the pain to notice the remainder of Sam’s approach. He doesn’t register his brother’s presence until the bloodied cuffs drop down onto the table in front of his face and oversized hands grip his injured shoulder in an all too familiar way.

“On three,” Sam says. “One…”

He pushes immediately, the lying bastard, and Dean yells a second time as his shoulder pops back into place. Almost immediately, the sharp, shooting agony dies down to a burning throb. Dean turns his face against the wood table and laughs hoarsely as pain travels up and down his arm in shivering waves.

“Don’t do that again,” Sam scolds. His hands linger on Dean’s shoulder, fingers gently rubbing some of the pain away, and Dean is in no position to shrug him off.

He rolls his head to the side again, ready to ask the obligatory ‘or what’ all bad guys ( _‘bad guys’, fuck, he’s never going to get used to thinking of Sam like that_ ) get when they try giving him orders, and then his eyes catch on the cuffs again and all the words dry up in his mouth.

Red Moon’s blood is evaporating. No, not evaporating, Dean sees when he looks closer. The metal is actually _absorbing_ it, making the etchings on the underside glow with sullen, blood-tinted fire.

As Dean stares, Sam’s hands fall away from his shoulder. A moment later, Sam walks around the far side of the table into view. Dean isn’t the only one who didn’t escape Red Moon’s death unscathed. Sam has blood on his face, in his hair, on his clothes. Not a whole lot, since Dean and the cuffs took the brunt of it, but… enough.

Dean doesn’t want Sam touching him.

He really doesn’t want the cuffs touching him.

“This will only take a few seconds,” Sam says, extending one hand and drawing the cuffs across the table to him with a pulse of power. “Then we’ll do a quick test to make sure everything’s working and get you somewhere quiet so we can ice that shoulder.” He touches Dean’s abraded and bleeding wrist with gentle fingertips. “The bracelets should take care of this.”

“Thanks,” Dean grits out, “but I’m going to have to pass. I don’t do bracelets.”

Sam gives him an amused, almost fond smile, and then picks up one of the cuffs and looks at Dean’s extended arm. The rope obediently slithers higher up, baring Dean’s wrist while maintaining an unbreakable hold on his hand. Dean clenches his jaw and tries to pull back again. He’s too worked up to favor his shoulder, but at the first sharp spike of pain, that warm weight is at his back again, shoving him forward and keeping him still. Heat sinks into the injured joint, forcing his muscles loose and fucking with the nerves and making it difficult as hell to move the rest of his arm.

“This won’t hurt,” Sam tells him, like that’s Dean’s problem—like he gives a shit about pain.

“Yeah, it is,” Dean growls, gripping the table again with his left hand. As leverage, that hold is obviously useless, but Dean needs the anchor. Holding Sam’s eyes with his own furious gaze, he finishes, “It’s gonna hurt like hell once I get free, because I’m gonna shove those fucking things down your throat.”

Sam ignores him, pulling the cuff open wider so that he can slide it into place around Dean’s wrist. The etchings feel alive against his skin, hot and squirming, and Dean’s stomach lurches. He gives his arm a futile, unfocused shake as Sam bends the metal closed until no more than a thin, hairline gap shows. Dean is breathing shallowly through his teeth, struggling against the urge to beg Sam to stop, to plead with Sam to take the damn thing off already.

He watches as Sam produces the knife again, this time to nick the inside of his own wrist with the tip. Blood wells up—slow, fat drops that fall down onto the cuff and are absorbed as completely as the old man’s blood. The sting of open, abused skin beneath the cuff vanishes. Dean can’t see his wrist anymore, but he’s certain that the damage done by the ropes has been completely healed, which is a whole new level of freak show.

“Sam,” he says, the words dragging themselves reluctantly from his throat. “Don’t.”

Keeping his golden, merciless eyes locked on Dean’s face, Sam leans down and presses his lips against the metal in a lingering kiss.

Dean’s pulse spikes as the etchings roil, sending heat into his wrist and, from there, up his arm and into his chest. The fire seems to sink when it hits his heart, following unseen lines deeper into Dean’s being—into his soul—and searing them closed. It doesn’t exactly hurt, but it’s invasive and uncomfortable as hell, and Dean jerks reflexively against the table, muscles trembling.

Eventually, the heat fades to nothing more than a distant echo. Sam lifts his head again, allowing Dean to see the unbroken band of metal where the gap used to be—the cuff’s closed seamlessly, like it’d been forged in a solid piece to begin with. When Dean twists his arm, rubbing his wrist against the inside of the cuff, he can’t feel any trace of the etchings that used to mar the metal.

The proud, warm smile Sam gives him only makes Dean’s stomach twist in on itself more.

“One down, one to go,” Sam announces. “Are you going to hold still for me this time?”

Dean laughs, the sound harsh and a little wild. He can’t help it. It’s laugh or cry, and he sure as fuck isn’t crying for Sam. Not for this ruined, twisted remnant of his brother.

Sam sighs in disappointment and gestures at the rope binding Dean’s right hand. It slithers free, releasing him, and then shoots down to grip his left wrist before he can even think to try outmaneuvering it. Dean tightens his hold on the edge of the table, fighting to keep his wrist hidden, and then swears as the insistent heave of the rope makes him lose his grip. His cuffed hand is free, though, and while Sam picks up the second cuff, Dean starts working at the rope with his fingers, fighting to get his thumb beneath one of the lower coils.

The cuff around his wrist warms warningly, which he ignores, and then snaps to the side, carrying his hand with it. It hits the table with a solid clink and seems to weld itself there, for all the success Dean has in trying to budge it. The metal is flush enough with his wrist that his struggles against the hold are virtually painless—just as futile as ever, but he isn’t going to be rubbing his skin raw trying to get away anymore, which might be part of Sam’s plan, or might just be an unintentional side effect.

Dean squeezes his eyes shut as Sam slides the other cuff around his left wrist and repeats the steps of what feels all too much like a ritual for Dean’s peace of mind. His stomach quakes and flips sickeningly as that rush of heat flows through him again—his insides squirm at the invasive, inward flood—but this time he thinks he can hear the metal soldering itself shut with a soft, subtle _snick_ that shouldn’t sound anywhere near so much like a cell door slamming shut.

The rope doesn’t release Dean, but it does become inert. The cuff around his right wrist cools, and he senses that, if he wanted to, he could pull the coils of rope off easily enough. For a long moment, though, he doesn’t move.

He simply drags in one breath, and then another. Then, on his third breath, he says, “You son of a bitch.”

“It’s for your own good,” Sam replies. “You’ll be safe now. And I know the rope was chafing you. Aren’t you glad we won’t have to bother with it anymore?”

 _No,_ Dean thinks as his inside curl tighter. He wishes he could reach into his chest and rub at the places those lines of heat went. The memory of the sensation makes him itch terribly. He thinks about that sensation of being somehow soldered shut and the inside of his mouth burns with a violated, sick taste.

Without lifting his head, he says, “I’m going to stop you. I’m going to figure out how to undo this mess, and I’m going to get my brother back.”

For a long moment, Sam is silent. Then a hand falls on Dean’s head—he jumps: somehow didn’t hear Sam coming.

“I told you, Dean,” Sam says, stroking his fingers through the mussed, short strands of Dean’s hair. “I _am_ your brother.”

The worst thing is that he sounds like he believes it.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

There’s a demon waiting for them outside the warehouse. One solitary, black-eyed man kneeling in front of the Impala. The demon drops its gaze when they emerge, bowing its head in a gesture of fealty that Dean doesn’t quite buy. Looks like not everyone is thrilled to have Sam in command.

“My Lord,” the demon greets Sam in a tone verging on disrespectful. “Azazel told to me to wait for you.”

“Yes,” Sam agrees. “I want you to look at my brother.”

Dean holds himself still and keeps his expression flat as the demon’s eyes lift again, its gaze sliding over his skin and leaving an intangible oily taint in its wake.

“Tell me what you see,” Sam orders.

“What I… see?” the demon says. It sounds uncertain now, shifting its gaze back toward Sam.

As far as Dean is concerned, Sam’s ‘test’ is over—if Dean were still ‘bright’ or whatever, the demon would be straining toward him right now. Or already incinerated by Sam’s power.

But Sam repeats, “Describe him.”

“Tall. Bloodied up. Dark hair. Green eyes. Freckles.” The demon’s mouth twitches with momentary amusement and it adds, “Pretty mouth,” in a tone that ignites an embarrassed flush beneath Dean’s skin.

Sam makes a tsking noise that’s ostensibly regretful but carries a strong undercurrent of vicious anger.

“You were doing so well, too,” he says. “Now we’re going to have to have a talk. Go inside and wait for me.”

The demon rises, but it doesn’t look concerned as it passes them and disappears inside the warehouse. In Dean’s opinion, this particular demon is a stupid fuck. Then again, it hasn’t been living with the new and improved Sam for the past week or so. And it likely doesn’t know how vindictive Sam could be even before his graveyard communion.

Something like a shockwave passes through the air and makes Dean shiver and shift another step further from his brother’s side. He thinks about running again and then, as the cuffs heat warningly around his wrists, doesn’t. He doesn’t want to find out right now just how quickly Sam could stop him, now that he’s wearing his brother’s tacky jewelry.

With the cuffs around his wrists, it strikes Dean as more important than ever that he get away—he has to get away before Sam comes up with a way to bind him even more closely. But first he has to come up with a plan that has a snowball’s chance in Hell of working.

He thinks again about getting Sam to lower his guard, about the kind of self-restraint that would take. He thinks about the kind of sacrifices that might require, and whether he can get through that sort of thing with his mind and heart intact.

He wonders if Sam’s self-restraint will hold out long enough for him to make the attempt. Whether Sam will get tired of Dean before Dean can put enough distance between them. Whether he can survive this at all.

Sam could slaughter Dean with a thought. He could choose any moment to decide Dean’s guts would look better decorating the interior of the Impala than they do coiled inside him.

A demon strolls around the side of the warehouse and walks toward them, bringing Dean’s attention back into the immediate present. This demon is wearing a woman’s body—petite with short, red hair and heavily freckled skin. The woman’s eyes might originally have been green, but Dean can’t tell beneath the beetled black gleam he gets from the demon now. It kneels with an air of more genuine respect, bows its head, and waits silently.

“I want you to carry a message to Azazel for me,” Sam says. “Tell him that I have some business to take care of here, but I’ll meet with his generals tomorrow.”

He takes a step closer to Dean, sliding a hand into place over Dean’s left bicep and gripping him securely against his instinctive desire to draw away. There’s a hungry, almost feral smile on Sam’s mouth.

“Tell him I’m ready to go to war.”


End file.
